Street is in this respect a type of the Scottish university system. The students attend lectures every day in a certain venerable building, but they live in their own homes; they live where they choose; it may be several miles away from the college. Nobody knows in what strange out-of-the-way places some of them build their nests. One poor fellow who makes a very decent appearance in the class lives in a garret raised thirteen stories over the Cowgate, while the man who sits next to him comes out clean cut, and beautifully polished every day from a palace in the West End. When the lecture is over all these students disperse, and they have no more cohesion than the congregation of a favourite preacher after the sermon is finished. They go off into back streets, and into queer alleys; they are lost round the corner; they go a little way into the country; they rush to the seaside; they burst into pieces like a shell. Nor is it very long since this unsociable system superseded the old plan of living together and dining at a common table. Perhaps Lord Campbell could give a very pretty picture of college life in his days, when at the university of St. Andrew's the students dined in common hall. He was a fellow student of Dr. Chalmers, and only a few years ago Tom Chalmers' room within St. Salvator's College was shown to visitors, while the janitor, with a peculiar chuckle, described the wild pranks in which the youthful divine employed his leisure moments, to the terror of the townspeople.
This state of things, although so recent, is almost forgotten in Scotland. There is no such thing as opposition between town and gown. In Edinburgh, indeed, there is no gown—no badge of studentship whatever. Worse than this, the student, after he has gone through his academical course, has nothing further to do with the university. Why should he take a degree? It is a bootless honour. It gives him no privileges. A.M. after a man's name on a title-page may look very pretty, but who is going to write books? "Not I," says the student; "and why should I run the chance of a pluck, besides going to the expense of the fees, when the certainty of success can bring me no advantage?"[1] Thus the bond between the student and the university, has been weakened to the utmost. What else are we to expect, when a great university, with all its venerable associations, is planned on the model of a day-school? In Scotland all schools are day-schools, from the very highest to the very lowest. The parental and domestic influence is esteemed so much, that no boy is allowed to escape from it, and the young man is kept under it as long as possible. The boy who is at school all day returns home in the evening to be kissed by his mamma and to be questioned by his papa. The student who has all the morning been dissecting dead bodies or devouring dissertations on the Epistles of Phalaris, returns to dine with his sisters and to kneel down at evening prayer with his grey-haired sire. The system has
- ↑ There are about 1,500 students at the Edinburgh University; of these only about eleven take the Bachelor's degree every year, about nine take the Master's degree, and about sixty are capped as medical doctors. It is expected, however, that the new regulations will increase the number of graduates.
