A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland | Page 4

found our chaise ready, and passed through
Kinghorn, Kirkaldy, and Cowpar, places not unlike the small or
straggling market-towns in those parts of England where commerce and
manufactures have not yet produced opulence.
Though we were yet in the most populous part of Scotland, and at so
small a distance from the capital, we met few passengers.
The roads are neither rough nor dirty; and it affords a southern stranger
a new kind of pleasure to travel so commodiously without the
interruption of toll-gates. Where the bottom is rocky, as it seems
commonly to be in Scotland, a smooth way is made indeed with great
labour, but it never wants repairs; and in those parts where adventitious
materials are necessary, the ground once consolidated is rarely broken;
for the inland commerce is not great, nor are heavy commodities often
transported otherwise than by water. The carriages in common use are
small carts, drawn each by one little horse; and a man seems to derive
some degree of dignity and importance from the reputation of
possessing a two-horse cart.

ST. ANDREWS

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 I have no pleasure in conjecturing. It is something that its
present state is at least not ostentatiously displayed. Where there is