ST. MARY’S COLLEGE LIBRARY.
A FINE PLANE TREE.
On the second day of our travellers’ stay “they went,” says Boswell, “and saw Colonel Nairne’s garden and grotto. Here was a fine old plane tree.[483] Unluckily the Colonel said there was but this and another large tree in the country.[484] This assertion was an excellent cue for Dr. Johnson, who laughed enormously, calling to me to hear it.” The Colonel’s father, Lord Nairne, had been “out in the ’45,” while the son, who fought in the King’s army, had been sent to batter down the old castle of his forefathers. George II. wished to reward his fidelity with the command of a regiment, but was hindered by the Duke of Cumberland, “who told the King that it was impossible that a man who had suffered so much could ever forget or forgive it.”[485] His garden and grotto were at the back of the Chapel. The grotto has disappeared with its “petrified stocks of trees,” unless perchance some remains of it are seen in a small building, which looks like a private chapel, and which might have been transformed by that ingenious collector of curiosities, the Colonel. The plane tree survived till about the beginning of the century. An old gentleman still living was told by his grandfather that in the branches a wooden platform had been built, on which tea-parties were held.[486] I remember seeing in my boyhood a similar platform in a large willow-tree overhanging Isaac Walton’s sedgy Lea. That the good people of St. Andrews have not in their traditions made Johnson drink a dozen or two cups of tea in this airy summer-house is a proof either of their truthfulness or of the sluggishness of their imagination.
A REVIVING UNIVERSITY.
Every Scotchman, it was said long ago, thought it his duty once in his life to visit “the city of the scarlet gown” and to see the ruins of the great cathedral.[487] No longer, happily, is the mind of the pilgrim “filled with mournful images and ineffectual wishes;” no longer does he see “a University pining in decay and struggling for life;” no longer does he wander through grass-grown streets, listening to the sound of his own solitary steps. The town is thriving and animated; the University sees the number of its students steadily increasing. It had long been depressed by poverty; but a noble endowment happily has this very year[488] fallen to its lot. If it can never hope to attain to those stately avenues and lawns and gardens and buildings, as beautiful as they are venerable, which are the boast of Oxford, nevertheless in the bracing pureness of its air, in its fine situation on the shores of the northern sea, in its seclusion from that bustle which distracts the student’s life, and from that luxury which too often makes poverty, however honest, hang its head, it has advantages which are not enjoyed by any other of our Universities.
LEUCHARS.