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 I
have 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.
The dissolution of St. Leonard's college was doubtless necessary;
but of that necessity there is reason to complain. It is surely
not without just reproach, that a nation, of which the commerce is
hourly extending, and the wealth encreasing, denies any
participation of its prosperity to its literary societies; and
while its merchants or its nobles are raising palaces, suffers its
universities to moulder into dust.
Of the two colleges yet standing, one is by the institution of its
founder appropriated to Divinity. It is said to be capable of
containing fifty students; but more than one must occupy a chamber.
The library, which is of late erection, is not very spacious, but
elegant and luminous.
The doctor, by whom it was shewn, hoped to irritate or subdue my
English vanity by telling me, that we had no such repository of
books in England.
Saint Andrews seems to be a place eminently adapted to study and
education, being situated in a populous, yet a cheap country, and
exposing the minds and manners of young men neither to the levity
and dissoluteness of a capital city, nor to the gross luxury of a
town of commerce, places naturally unpropitious to learning; in one
the desire of knowledge easily gives way to the love of pleasure,
and in the other, is in danger of yielding to the love of money.
The students however are represented as at this time not exceeding
a hundred. Perhaps it may be some obstruction to their increase
that there is no episcopal chapel in the place. I saw no reason
for imputing their paucity to the present professors; nor can the
expence of an academical education be very reasonably objected. A
student of the highest class may keep his annual session, or as the
English call it, his term, which lasts seven months, for about
fifteen pounds, and one of lower rank for less than ten; in which
board, lodging, and instruction are all included.
