The weather was fine, so that our travellers had a pleasant crossing over “that great gulf” which Hume “regarded with horror and a kind of hydrophobia that kept him,” he said, from visiting Adam Smith at Kirkaldy.[439] In Humphry Clinker Matthew Bramble had had so rough a passage, that when he was told that he had been saved “by the particular care of Providence,” he replied, “Yes, but I am much of the honest Highlander’s mind, after he had made such a passage as this. His friend told him he was much indebted to Providence. ‘Certainly,’ said Donald, ‘but by my saul, mon, I’se ne’er trouble Providence again so long as the Brig of Stirling stands.’”[440]
[The Drive to St. Andrews (August 18).]
POST-CHAISES AND ROADS.
At Kinghorn, “a mean town,” which was said to consist chiefly of “horse-hirers and boatmen noted all Scotland over for their impudence and impositions,”[441] our travellers took a post-chaise for St. Andrews. A few years earlier Johnson would not have found there his favourite mode of conveyance. By the year 1758 post-chaises had only penetrated as far north as Durham.[442] He found the roads good, “neither rough nor dirty.” The absence of toll-gates, “afforded a southern stranger a new kind of pleasure.” He would not have rejoiced over this absence had he known that their want was supplied by the forced labour of the cottars. On these poor men was laid “an annual tax of six days’ labour for repairing the roads.”[443] Used as he was to the rapid succession of carriages and riders, and to the beautiful and varied scenery in the neighbourhood of London, he complained that in Scotland there was “little diversion for 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.” There were few of the heavy waggons which were seen on the roads in England. A small cart drawn by one little horse was the carriage in common use. “A man seemed to derive some degree of dignity and importance from the reputation of possessing a two-horse cart.” KIRKALDY. Three miles beyond Kinghorn they drove through Kirkaldy, “a very long town, meanly built,” where Adam Smith perhaps at that very time was taking his one amusement, “a long, solitary walk by the sea-side,” smiling and talking to himself and meditating his Wealth of Nations.[444] Here, too, Thomas Carlyle was to have “will and waygate” upon all his friend Irving’s books, and here “with greedy velocity” he was to read the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire at the rate of a volume a day. Along the beach he was to walk “in summer twilights, a mile of the smoothest sand, with one long wave coming on gently, steadily, and breaking in gradual explosion into harmless, melodious white at your hand all the way.”[445] Of all the scenery which Johnson saw, either here or on the rest of his drive, his description is of the briefest. “The whole country,” he wrote, “is extended in uniform nakedness, except that in the road between Kirkaldy and Cupar I passed for a few yards between two hedges.” Night, however, had come on before their journey was ended, for they had lost time at Inch Keith. They could not, moreover, have been driven at a fast pace, for between Kinghorn and St. Andrews, a distance of nearly thirty miles, there was no change of horses to be had.[446] They crossed, perhaps without knowing it, Magus Moor, where Archbishop Sharpe, “driving home from a council day,” was killed “by a party of furious men.”[447] In going over this same moor many years later, Sir Walter Scott, being moved, as he says, by the spirit to give a picture of the assassination, so told his tale that he “frightened away the night’s sleep of one of his fellow-travellers.”[448]
[St. Andrews (August 18-20).]
ST. ANDREWS.
Coming as they did through the darkness to St. Andrews, they saw nothing of that “august appearance” which the seat of the most ancient of the Scotch universities presented from afar. “It appears,” said an early traveller, “much like Bruges in Flanders at a distance; its colleges and fine steeples making a goodly appearance.”[449] They arrived late, after a dreary drive, but “found a good supper at Glass’s Inn, and Dr. Johnson revived agreeably.” Who was Glass and which was his inn I could not ascertain. The old Scotch custom of calling a house not after its sign but its landlord, renders identification difficult. Wherever it was they found it full; but “by the interposition of some invisible friend,” to use Johnson’s words, “lodgings were provided at the house of one of the professors.” The invisible friend was a relation of that “most universal genius,” Dr. Arbuthnot, whom Johnson once ranked first among the writers in Queen Anne’s reign. Their host was Dr. Robert Watson, the author of the History of Philip II. and Philip III. of Spain, “an interesting, clear, well-arranged, and rather feeble-minded work,” as Carlyle described it.[450] ST. LEONARD’S COLLEGE. His house had formerly been part of St. Leonard’s College, but had been purchased by him at the time when that ancient institution, by being merged in St. Salvator’s, lost its separate existence. A traveller who had visited St. Andrews about the year 1723 saw the old cells of the monks, two storeys high, on the southern side of the college. “On the west was a goodly pile of buildings, but all out of repair.”[451] Wesley, who came to the town three years after Johnson, does not seem to have known how large a part of the old buildings had been converted into a private house, for he wrote that “what was left of St. Leonard’s College was only a heap of ruins.”[452] Of the inside of the ancient chapel Johnson could not get a sight:
“I was always, by some civil excuse, hindered 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.”
ST. LEONARD’S COLLEGE.