At an hour somewhat late we came to St.Andrews,a city once archiepiscopal;where that university still subsists in which philosophy was formerly taught by Buchanan,whose name has as fair a claim to immortality as can be conferred by modern latinity,and perhaps a fairer than the instability of vernacular languages admits.
We found,that by the interposition of some invisible friend,lodgings had been provided for us at the house of one of the professors,whose easy civility quickly made us forget that we were strangers;and in the whole time of our stay we were gratified by every mode of kindness,and entertained with all the elegance of lettered hospitality.
In the morning we rose to perambulate a city,which only history shews to have once flourished,and surveyed the ruins of ancient magnificence,of which even the ruins cannot long be visible,unless some care be taken to preserve them;and where is the pleasure of preserving such mournful memorials?They have been till very lately so much neglected,that every man carried away the stones who fancied that he wanted them.
The cathedral,of which the foundations may be still traced,and a small part of the wall is standing,appears to have been a spacious and majestick building,not unsuitable to the primacy of the kingdom.Of the architecture,the poor remains can hardly exhibit,even to an artist,a sufficient specimen.It was demolished,as is well known,in the tumult and violence of Knox's reformation.
Not far from the cathedral,on the margin of the water,stands a fragment of the castle,in which the archbishop anciently resided.
It was never very large,and was built with more attention to security than pleasure.Cardinal Beatoun is said to have had workmen employed in improving its fortifications at the time when he was murdered by the ruffians of reformation,in the manner of which Knox has given what he himself calls a merry narrative.
The change of religion in Scotland,eager and vehement as it was,raised an epidemical enthusiasm,compounded of sullen scrupulousness and warlike ferocity,which,in a people whom idleness resigned to their own thoughts,and who,conversing only with each other,suffered no dilution of their zeal from the gradual influx of new opinions,was long transmitted in its full strength from the old to the young,but by trade and intercourse with England,is now visibly abating,and giving way too fast to that laxity of practice and indifference of opinion,in which men,not sufficiently instructed to find the middle point,too easily shelter themselves from rigour and constraint.
The city of St.Andrews,when it had lost its archiepiscopal pre-eminence,gradually decayed:One of its streets is now lost;and in those that remain,there is silence and solitude of inactive indigence and gloomy depopulation.
The university,within a few years,consisted of three colleges,but is now reduced to two;the college of St.Leonard being lately dissolved by the sale of its buildings and the appropriation of its revenues to the professors of the two others.The chapel of the alienated college is yet standing,a fabrick not inelegant of external structure;but I was always,by some civil excuse,hindred from entering it.A decent attempt,as I was since told,has been made to convert it into a kind of green-house,by planting its area with shrubs.This new method of gardening is unsuccessful;the plants do not hitherto prosper.To what use it will next be put Ihave no pleasure in conjecturing.It is something that its present state is at least not ostentatiously displayed.Where there is yet shame,there may in time be virtue.
