Page:Footsteps of Dr. Johnson.djvu/333

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GLASGOW UNIVERSITY.
265

each." There was another daily "machine" belonging to a different set of proprietors, besides one which ran only three times a week, and charged but 8s. 6d. "The Carlisle Diligence," it is announced, "sets out every lawful day."

As we gaze on the filthy river which runs by the large city, on the dense cloud of smoke which hangs over it, on the grimy streets which have swallowed up the country far and wide, while we exult in the display of man's ingenuity and strength, and in the commerce by which the good things of earth are so swiftly and cheaply interchanged, we may mourn over the beautiful little town among the apple-trees which stood so deliciously on the banks of the fair and pure stream that ran to seawards beneath the arches of the old stone bridge. How far removed from us are those days when Glasgow was pillaged by the wild rabble of Highlanders! Yet I have an uncle[1] still living who remembers his grandfather and his grandfather's brother, one of whom had climbed up a tree to see the other march with a body of Worcestershire volunteers against the Young Pretender.

Johnson, after seeing the sights of the city, visited the college. "It has not had," he writes, "a sufficient share of the increasing magnificence of the place." From the account which Dr. Alexander Carlyle gives of the citizens, as he had known them about thirty years earlier, they were not likely to trouble themselves much about the glory of their University. With a few exceptions they were "shopkeepers and mechanics, or successful pedlars, who occupied large warerooms full of manufactures of all sorts to furnish a cargo to Virginia In those accomplishments and that taste that belong to people of opulence, much more to persons of education, they were far behind the citizens of Edinburgh." There was not a teacher of French or of music in the whole town. Nevertheless, in the University itself he found "learning an object of more importance, and the habit of application much more general" than in the rival institution in the capital.[2] Wesley compared the two squares which formed the college with the small quadrangles of Lincoln College, Oxford, of which he was a Fellow, and did not think them larger, or at all handsomer. He was surprised at the dress of the students. "They wear scarlet gowns, reaching only to their knees. Most I saw were very dirty, some very ragged,

  1. Mr. Frederic Hill, late Assistant-Secretary to the Post Office.
  2. Dr. A. Carlyle's Autobiography, pp. 71, 74.