But Whoever Surveys
The World Must See Many Things That Give Him Pain.
The kindness of
the professors did not contribute to abate the uneasy remembrance
of an university declining, a college alienated, and a church
profaned and hastening to the ground.
St. Andrews indeed has formerly suffered more atrocious ravages and
more extensive destruction, but recent evils affect with greater
force. We were reconciled to the sight of archiepiscopal ruins.
The distance of a calamity from the present time seems to preclude
the mind from contact or sympathy. Events long past are barely
known; they are not considered. We read with as little emotion the
violence of Knox and his followers, as the irruptions of Alaric and
the Goths. 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.
ABERBROTHICK
As we knew sorrow and wishes to be vain, it was now our business to
mind our way. The roads of Scotland afford little diversion to the
traveller, who seldom sees himself either encountered or overtaken,
and who has nothing to contemplate but grounds that have no visible
boundaries, or are separated by walls of loose stone. From the
bank of the Tweed to St. Andrews I had never seen a single tree,
which I did not believe to have grown up far within the present
century. Now and then about a gentleman's house stands a small
plantation, which in Scotch is called a policy, but of these there
are few, and those few all very young.
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