A Publisher and His Friends - Memoir and Correspondence of John Murray; with an - Account of the Origin and Progress of the House, 1768-1843 by Samuel Smiles
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page 52 of 594 (08%)
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promised visit to Edinburgh. He was warmly received by Constable and
Hunter, and enjoyed their hospitality for some days. After business matters had been disposed of, he was taken in hand by Hunter, the junior partner, and led off by him to enjoy the perilous hospitality of the Forfarshire lairds. Those have been called the days of heroic drinking. Intemperance prevailed to an enormous extent. It was a time of greater licentiousness, perhaps, in all the capitals of Europe, and this northern one among the rest, than had been known for a long period. Men of the best education and social position drank like the Scandinavian barbarians of olden times. Tavern-drinking, now almost unknown among the educated and professional classes of Edinburgh, was then carried by all ranks to a dreadful excess. Murray was conducted by Hunter to his father's house of Eskmount in Forfarshire, where he was most cordially received, and in accordance with the custom of the times the hospitality included invitations to drinking bouts at the neighbouring houses. An unenviable notoriety in this respect attached to William Maule (created Baron Panmure 1831). He was the second son of the eighth Earl of Dalhousie, but on succeeding, through his grandmother, to the estates of the Earls of Panmure, he had assumed the name of Maule in lieu of that of Ramsay. Much against his will, Murray was compelled to take part in some of these riotous festivities with the rollicking, hard-drinking Forfarshire lairds, and doubtless he was not sorry to make his escape at length uninjured, if not unscathed, and to return to more congenial society in |
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