Page:Footsteps of Dr. Johnson.djvu/121

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ST. ANDREWS.
89

appears," said an early traveller, "much like Bruges in Flanders at a distance; its colleges and fine steeples making a goodly appearance."[1] They arrived late, after a dreary drive, but "found a good supper at Glass's Inn, and Dr. Johnson revived agreeably." Who was Glass and which was his inn I could not ascertain. The old Scotch custom of calling a house not after its sign but its landlord, renders identification difficult. Wherever it was they found it full; but "by the interposition of some invisible friend," to use Johnson's words, "lodgings were provided at the house of one of the professors." The invisible friend was a relation of that "most universal genius," Dr. Arbuthnot,
St. Leonard's College
whom Johnson once ranked first among the writers in Queen Anne's reign. Their host was Dr. Robert Watson, the author of the History of Philip II. and Philip III. of Spain, "an interesting, clear, well-arranged, and rather feeble-minded work," as Carlyle described it.[2] His house had formerly been part of St. Leonard's College, but had been purchased by him at the time when that ancient institution, by being merged in St. Salvator's, lost its separate existence. A traveller who had visited St. Andrews about the year 1723 saw the old cells of the monks, two storeys high, on the southern side of the college. "On the west was a goodly pile of buildings, but all out of repair."[3] Wesley, who came to the town three years after Johnson, does not seem to have known how large a part of the old buildings had been converted into a private house, for he wrote that "what was left of St. Leonard's College was

  1. Macky's Journey through Scotland, p. 83.
  2. Early Letters of Thomas Carlyle, ed. 1886, i. 187.
  3. Macky's Journey through Scotland, p. 87.