“The students have lately been compelled to live within the college. We need but look out at our windows to see when they rise and when they go to bed. They are seen nine or ten times throughout the day statedly by one or other of the masters—at public prayers, school hours, meals, and in their rooms, besides occasional visits which we can make with little trouble to ourselves. They are shut up within walls at nine at night. This discipline hath indeed taken some pains and resolution, as well as some expense to establish it. The board at the first table is 50 merks[528] per quarter; at the second, 40 shillings. The rent of a room is from seven to twenty shillings in the session. There is no furniture in their rooms but bedstead, tables, chimney grate and fender—the rest they must buy or hire. They provide fire, and candle, and washing to themselves. The other dues are two guineas to the Master; to the Professors of Greek and Humanity [Latin] for their public teaching, five shillings each. All other perquisites not named, from twelve shillings to seventeen and sixpence.”[529]
KING’S COLLEGE, ABERDEEN.
ENGLISH STUDENTS.
Whether this reformed system lasted in its full extent to the time of Johnson’s visit, I do not know; some part of it at all events remained. “In the King’s College,” he says, “there is kept a public table, but the scholars of the Marischal College are boarded in the town.” In Aberdeen, as well as in the other Scotch Universities, students from England were commonly found. Johnson was surprised at finding in King’s College a great-grandson of Waller the poet. But in the state of degradation into which the English Universities were sunk, what was more natural than that young Englishmen should be sent to places where the Professors still remembered that they had a duty to perform as well as a salary to receive? I have seen in the Royal Society of Edinburgh a manuscript letter written by Dr. Blair from that town to David Hume in 1765, in which he says:—“Our education here is at present in high reputation. The Englishes are crowding down upon us every season, and I wish may not come to hurt us at last.” Excellent though the Aberdeen Professors were as teachers, yet before the great Englishman they seemed afraid to speak. Johnson, writing to Mrs. Thrale, said:—“Boswell was very angry that they would not talk.”
MARISCHAL COLLEGE.
REYNOLDS’S PORTRAIT OF BEATTIE.
In Marischal College scarcely a fragment remains of the old building which our travellers saw, except the stone with the curious inscription:—“Thay haif said; quhat say thay; lat thame say.” In the spacious modern library is shown, however, a famous picture which Reynolds was at that time painting. On that very morning when Robertson was showing Johnson Holyrood Palace, Reynolds began the allegorical picture in which he represented Truth and the amiable and harmonious Beattie triumphing together over scepticism and infidelity.[530] It was commonly said that in the group of discomfited figures could be recognized the portraits of Voltaire and Hume. Goldsmith, if we may trust Northcote, reproached Reynolds “for wishing to degrade so high a genius as Voltaire before so mean a writer as Dr. Beattie.”[531] If Voltaire’s face is to be found in the picture, the likeness is so remote that even he, sensitive though he was, could scarcely have take offence, while of Hume not even the caricature can be discovered. Feeble though the allegory is, the portrait of Beattie is a very fine piece of workmanship. In Marischal College, by the generosity of his grand-nieces it has found its fitting resting-place, for here for many years he was Professor of Moral Philosophy. Here a few years earlier he had been visited by Gray, who, to quote Johnson’s words, “found him a poet, a philosopher, and a good man.”[532]
