Inspired by a stray volume of Lord Byron when about twelve years old, he borrowed books from public libraries in various towns visited in the wanderings of the family, and by the age of twenty he had read widely.
William Makepeace Thackeray, hearing Samuel Lover recite his Lords of Labour in 1859, exclaimed: "I don't think Burns himself could have taken the wind out of this man's sails".
[2][3] Macfarlan suffered from tuberculosis; in October 1862 he collapsed after a day trying to sell his prose pamphlet, An Attic Study.
He seemed to possess two separate and distinct individualities: one soaring high in the sunny empyrean of the sacred Nine, the other grovelling in the dingiest purlieus of the populous 'City by the Clyde.
His works are: Subsequently he published two tracts, The Wanderers of the West, a poem, and a series of acute and suggestive prose reflections, entitled An Attic Study; brief Notes on Nature, Men, and Books.