Bute had already accepted an engagement to preside this year (1889) at the St. Andrew's Day dinner of the Scottish Corporation in London, but {149} was extremely dubious as to what kind of reception he would have from a company of whom many were doubtless quite out of sympathy with the views on Scottish Home Rule set forth in this article. His letter on this subject, expressing his obvious relief at the manner in which things had turned out, makes amusing reading: Chiswick House, _December_ 1, 1889. The St. Andrew's Day dinner came off last night. I had been extremely nervous about it, so that I could really take up nothing else until it was over. This was folly, and really almost sinful folly, because the desire to be liked is only vanity at bottom, and vanity is a bastard cousin to pride. But I knew also (and there I was on fair enough ground) that, although politics were not to be mentioned, the thing was in fact to be a political demonstration, and that it was not yours truly, John M. of B., who was to be placed in the chair, but the author of "Parliament in Scotland"; and the question was, how the Scottish commercial colony in London would receive him. It had even been publicly suggested in print that the charity should be boycotted because I had been asked to take the chair, "although, no doubt," (the writer charitably added,) "that must have been done before the article appeared." Well, the festival duly came off, and I think I was never more cheered in my life. They cheered for quite long periods every time I had to come forward, from the time I entered the drawing-room before the dinner. And I will not quote the language which was used to me about the speech which I made. The interest which Bute had always felt in St. Magnus of Orkney since his visit, or pilgrimage, to the scene of the saint's martyrdom in his under-graduate days,[10] was evinced by the new and careful {150} investigations which he undertook in 1886, in view of an article on the subject in his _Review_. His cautious, yet reverent, attitude towards the supernatural is well shown in a passage of a letter to his publisher, relating to the local tradition about a perennially green spot of ground said to mark the site of Magnus's death in the isle of Egilsay: I own that, with such information as I have ever had, together with my own recollections of the place, I am inclined to think that the phenomenon is, if not strictly miraculous, in the strongest sense of the word, a special intervention of Divine Providence, which may be called a preternatural testimony of God's favour towards His martyred servant.