R F Murray: His Poems with a Memoir by Andrew Lang | Page 6

R.F. Murray
including those of Argyll and the great Marquis of Montrose. Early in the present century the old ruinous college buildings of St. Salvator's ceased to be habitable, except by a ghost! There is another spectre of a noisy sort in St. Leonard's. The new buildings are mere sets of class-rooms, the students live where they please, generally in lodgings, which they modestly call bunks. There is a hall for dinners in common; it is part of the buildings of the Union, a new hall added to an ancient house.
It was thus to a university with ancient associations, with a religio loci, and with more united and harmonious student-life than is customary in Scotland, that Murray came in 1881. How clearly his biographer remembers coming to the same place, twenty years earlier! how vivid is his memory of quaint streets, grey towers, and the North Sea breaking in heavy rollers on the little pier!
Though, like a descendant of Archbishop Sharp, and a winner of the archery medal, I boast myself Sancti Leonardi alumnus addictissimus, I am unable to give a description, at first hand, of student life in St. Andrews. In my time, a small set of `men' lived together in what was then St. Leonard's Hall. The buildings that remain on the site of Prior Hepburn's foundation, or some of them, were turned into a hall, where we lived together, not scattered in bunks. The existence was mainly like that of pupils of a private tutor; seveneighths of private tutor to one-eighth of a college in the English?universities. We attended the lectures in the University, we distinguished ourselves no more than Murray would have approved of, and many of us have remained united by friendship through half a lifetime.
It was a pleasant existence, and the perfume of buds and flowers in the old gardens, hard by those where John Knox sat and talked with James Melville and our other predecessors at St. Leonard's, is fragrant in our memories. It was pleasant, but St. Leonard's Hall has ceased to be, and the life there was not the life of the free and hardy bunk-dwellers. Whoso pined for such dissipated pleasures as the chill and dark streets of St. Andrews offer to the gay and rousing blade, was not encouraged. We were very strictly `gated,' though the whole society once got out of window, and, by way of protest, made a moonlight march into the country. We attended `gaudeamuses' and solatia--University suppers--but little; indeed, he who writes does not remember any such diversions of boys who beat the floor, and break the glass. To plant the standard of cricket in the remoter gardens of our country, in a region devastated by golf, was our ambition, and here we had no assistance at all from the University. It was chiefly at lecture, at football on the links, and in the debating societies that we met our fellow-students; like the celebrated starling, `we could not get out,' except to permitted dinners and evening parties. Consequently one could only sketch student life with a hand faltering and untrained. It was very different with Murray and his friends. They were their own masters, could sit up to all hours, smoking, talking, and, I dare say, drinking. As I gather from his letters, Murray drank nothing stronger than water. There was a certain kind of humour in drink, he said, but he thought it was chiefly obvious to the sober spectator. As the sober spectator, he sang of violent delights which have violent ends. He may best be left to illustrate student life for himself. The `waster' of whom he chants is the slang name borne by the local fast man.
THE WASTER SINGING AT MIDNIGHT.?AFTER LONGFELLOW.
Loud he sang the song Ta Phershon?For his personal diversion,?Sang the chorus U-pi-dee,?Sang about the Barley Bree.
In that hour when all is quiet?Sang he songs of noise and riot,?In a voice so loud and queer?That I wakened up to hear.
Songs that distantly resembled?Those one hears from men assembled?In the old Cross Keys Hotel,?Only sung not half so well.
For the time of this ecstatic?Amateur was most erratic,?And he only hit the key?Once in every melody.
If "he wot prigs wot isn't his'n?Ven he's cotched is sent to prison,"?He who murders sleep might well?Adorn a solitary cell.
But, if no obliging peeler?Will arrest this midnight squealer,?My own peculiar arm of might?Must undertake the job to-night.
The following fragment is but doubtfully autobiographical. `The swift four-wheeler' seldom devastates the streets where, of old, the Archbishop's jackmen sliced Presbyterian professors with the claymore, as James Melville tells us:-
TO NUMBER 27x.
Beloved Peeler! friend and guide?And guard of many a midnight reeler,?None worthier, though the world is wide,?Beloved Peeler.
Thou from before the swift four-wheeler?Didst pluck me, and didst thrust aside?A strongly built provision-dealer
Who menaced me with blows, and cried?`Come on! come
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