The Foreshadowing of the Southern Gentleman?

"The long plaid, which could be belted into a kilt and draped over the shoulders in a shawl, was the poor Highlandman's only dress. Elaborations were for his betters, and when gentlemen of high degree dressed themselves in splendor it was with a savage and vivid magnificence. A chief, since he preferred to ride a Sheltie rather than walk, wore trews of skin-tight tartan and not the kilt. His hair was tied back with a ribbon, and powdered if he had acquired the fashion abroad [chiefs, unlike their people, often went away for college]. His bonnet was trimmed with the eagle feather that marked his rank. He wore a tartan jacket and a tartan waistcoat, a plaid tartan that fell from the silver and cairngorn brooch on his left shoulder. If he chose to wear the kilt and not trews, a silver and leather sporran hung from his waist, and his calves were covered to the knee with hose of tartan fret. Tartan from shoulder to brogues, plaid, kilt and stockings often of a different sett, so that his clothes burned and glowed with green and yellow, blue and scarlet [the identification of particular setts with particular clans is a 19th century Romantic development apparently without much tradition behind it!].

"He armed himself with claw-handled steel pistols, known as Highland dags, two of them dangling from his belt. His round, bullhide target [i.e., shield; see the book cover] was studded with silver bosses, and was frequently mounted with a steel spike twelve inches long. On one hip he carried a basket-hilted broadsword, double-edged, a yard long, and two inches wide. On the other he wore his dirk, its haft richly wrought with silver, its scabbard pouched for knife and fork [in former times it was customary to carry these with you; most hosts couldn't afford to supply them, or at least it would have been rude to expect it]. Thrust into the top of his hose on one calf was a tiny black knife. And thus he stood in magnificence, a savage man who might speak French and Latin, who could distinguish between a good claret and a bad, who believed in the blood feud and the Holy Trinity, who would bargain like an Edinburgh chandler to secure a profitable marriage for his daughter, who could sell his tenants to the plantations [in the Caribbean] but who would touch his sword at the slightest reflection on his honor. A man of wild and ridiculous poetry, harsh and remorseless principle, a man who was, by 1746, an uncomfortable anachronism."

--pages 44-45