In religion, Aberdeen is strongly Episcopalian, where it is not Catholic. In truth there is a band of Catholicism running across the country, from Aberdeen to Skye, through the heart of the Highlands. As might be expected, the Highlands never yielded to the reformatory methods of John Knox, but remained of the faith.
MARISCHAL COLLEGE.
There is no city that looks so Scottish, and yet so different, as Aberdeen. It is a dignified and an extraordinarily clean city. After a rain its granite glitters as though it had been newly cut, and to one accustomed to smoke-grimed American cities Aberdeen looks as though it were built this morning, when no doubt much of this granite has a right to the hoar of antiquity.
Marischal College, founded by the Keiths, who were Earl Marischals, boasts of being the greatest granite pile in the world, after the Escorial. Having walked a day through a circumscribed portion of that Spanish granite, I chose to limit my footsteps in Marischal college. Only to verify the stone did I enter. And there it stood, over the doorway of the inner entrance hall, that stone which gives me a certain ancestral right of hauteur—
Thay half said.
Quhat say thay?
Lat thame say.
Scots are astonishingly fond of mottoes. They carve them, like Orlando's verse, if not on every tree, on every lintel and over every fireplace; from Nemo me impune lacessit of the royal thistle race, to every clan and every cottage.
King's College (1495) is an older foundation than Marischal (1593), and where once they were rivals, since the Eighteen Sixties they have been harmonized, and since Mr. Carnegie gave them his benefaction, education is free in this University of Aberdeen. King's College, if not the next greatest granite pile, has a stone cross, which is the typical capping of noble edifice in Scotland; in truth it begins at Newcastle on Tyne when one enters the English beginning of the Border.
The cathedral of St. Machar's, first founded by the saint who was a disciple of Columba, was refounded by the saint who was David I—of course; what a busy saint this was—and looks the part of age, but of strength rather than arrogance, with its low lying towers.
There is an old town even in the new town, and the contrast is sharp. If one gets lost, turns suddenly into this old part, it is a curious experience. The buildings look medieval, French provincial, and the people look strange and foreign; also they treat you, a foreigner, with all that curiosity, and something of that disrespect which you, of course, deserve, having interloped into their sanctuary. The Duke of Cumberland lived here for six weeks before advancing on Culloden, and while he did not "butcher" here to deserve his name, his soldiers left as ugly a fame behind them as Montrose's men, what time he made bloody assault on the city.