A lit tavern, a stage-coach, post-horses, the clack of hoofs on a frosty road, went to his head like wine.

He was a Jacobite not because he had any views on Divine Right, but because he had always before his eyes a picture of a knot of adventurers in cloaks, new landed from France among the western heather.
On this select basis he had built up his small library--Defoe, Hakluyt, Hazlitt and the essayists, Boswell, some indifferent romances, and a shelf of spirited poetry.

His tastes became known, and he acquired a reputation for a scholarly habit.

He was president of the Literary Society of the Guthrie Memorial Kirk, and read to its members a variety of papers full of a gusto which rarely became critical.

He had been three times chairman at Burns Anniversary dinners, and had delivered orations in eulogy of the national Bard; not because he greatly admired him--he thought him rather vulgar--but because he took Burns as an emblem of the un-Burns-like literature which he loved.