was not done in that country, "was in the habit when he purchased anything of putting the cash in a piece of paper, on which he wrote what it was to pay. This lie kept in his desk twelve months, saying that the English traders are a set of rascals."[1] The poorer Scotch students, however, had to bear great privations. "The miserable holes which some of them inhabit," writes a young English traveller, "their abstemiousness and parsimony, their constant attendance to study, their indefatigable industry, border on romance."[2] At St. Andrews they often were too poor to buy candles, and had to study by fire-light.[3] In spite of the extraordinary cheapness of the life their numbers were dwindling. They did not at this time exceed a hundred, says Johnson. Three years later Wesley was told that there were only about seventy.[4] "To the sight of archiepiscopal ruins," Johnson was reconciled, he said, by the remoteness of the calamity which had befallen them. "Had the University been destroyed two centuries ago we should not have regretted it; but to see it pining in decay and struggling for life fills the mind with mournful images and ineffectual wishes." Some improvement, nevertheless, had of late been made. Defoe, in the year 1727, had described the whole building of St. Salvator's College "as looking into its grave.[5] The account given by Boswell of the fabric is much more cheerful. "The rooms for students," he writes, "seemed very commodious, and Dr. Johnson said the chapel was the neatest place of worship he had seen." Nevertheless, at the beginning of this century some of the lecture-rooms were described as being places "in which a gentleman would be ashamed to lodge his hacks or his terriers."[6] It was fortunate for the reputation of the College that our two travellers had not visited it earlier in the summer, otherwise they would have had to report a disgraceful sight which three years later shocked John Wesley. It was soon after the beginning of the Long Vacation that he was there, before the glaziers had repaired the wreck which marked the end of the yearly course. It was the custom, he was told, for the students to break all the windows before they left. "Where," asks Wesley, indignantly,
- ↑ G. M. Berkeley's Poems, p. cccxcvi.
- ↑ Topham's Letters from Edinburgh, p. 208.
- ↑ G. M. Berkeley's Poems, p. cccxlix.
- ↑ Wesley's Journal, iv. 77.
- ↑ Tour through Great Britain: Account of Scotland, iii. 154. Defoe calls it St. Salvadore's, and wonders "how it was made to speak Portuguese." Boswell gives it the same name, though he spells it differently—St. Salvador's. By 1807 I find it called in Grierson's Delineations of St. Andrews, as it is at present, St. Salvator's.
- ↑ St. Andrews as it was and as it is, p. 157.
