Scott succeeded his friend Sir James Hall as President in 1820, the only member of the Literary Class of the Society to attain that office. In Dr Melville Clark's words he did so 'only after it had been urged upon him that it was proper to let the Literary Class occasionally supply the chief of the whole body.' To tell the truth, Scott was delighted by the honour, with an engaging mixture of pride, surprise, and comic deprecation. Of those who elected him to office, Clark's opinion was that they 'saw in him not only a great poet and novelist but also a many-sided and far-sighted man of affairs; not only as romantic, imaginative, and backward-looking, but also as wide-awake, practical, and forward-looking, with a lively interest in the world as it then was and was to be and not least in that growing end of knowledge which we call science.