In Scotland, all students study.
To be able to have the luxury of studying, or rather "residing" (such is the less pretentious name in use), at Oxford or Cambridge, you must be well-to-do.
In Scotland, as in Germany, Greece, Switzerland, and America, the poorest young men may aspire to university honours; but often at the cost of what privations!
Here are a few incidents of students' life in Scotland. They struck me as being very interesting, very touching. I borrow them, for the most part, from a writer who published them in a Scotch Review during my stay in Edinburgh.
He mentions one young man, of fine manners and aristocratic appearance, who dined but three times a week, and then upon a hot two-penny pie. On the other days he lived on dry bread.
Another had an ingenious way of turning his scanty resources to account. Spreading out his books where the hearthrug would naturally have been, he would lie there, learning his task by the light of a fire, made from the roots of decayed trees, which he had dug in a wood near Edinburgh, and carried to his lodgings.
Three Scotchmen, now occupying high positions, shared a room containing one bed; and for a year at least, while attending Aberdeen University, they had no other lodging. The bed was a very narrow one, and quite incapable of holding two persons at once; so two worked while the other slept, and when they went to bed, he rose.
Two other students excited a great deal of curiosity for some time. One carried his books before him just as if they had been a tray, while he glided noiselessly to his place. This mystery was explained when it was learned that he had been a hotel waiter. During the winter he pursued his studies; and when summer returned, it found him, with serviette across his arm, earning the necessary fees for his next winter's course of study.
He never could quite throw off the waiter. If a professor called his name suddenly, he would start up and answer, "Coming, sir—coming!"
The other was more mysterious still. As soon as recitation was over, he would start away from the class-room and make for the environs of the town as fast as he could run. It was at last discovered that he kept a little book shop at some distance from the University, and, being too poor to hire an assistant, had to close his door to customers while he went to recite his lessons.