With
great labour, but it never wants repairs; and in those parts where
adventitious materials are necessary, the ground once consolidated
is rarely broken; for the inland commerce is not great, nor are
heavy commodities often transported otherwise than by water. The
carriages in common use are small carts, drawn each by one little
horse; and a man seems to derive some degree of dignity and
importance from the reputation of possessing a two-horse cart.
ST. ANDREWS
At an hour somewhat late we came to St. Andrews, a city once
archiepiscopal; where that university still subsists in which
philosophy was formerly taught by Buchanan, whose name has as fair
a claim to immortality as can be conferred by modern latinity, and
perhaps a fairer than the instability of vernacular languages
admits.
We found, that by the interposition of some invisible friend,
lodgings had been provided for us at the house of one of the
professors, whose easy civility quickly made us forget that we were
strangers; and in the whole time of our stay we were gratified by
every mode of kindness, and entertained with all the elegance of
lettered hospitality.
In the morning we rose to perambulate a city, which only history
shews to have once flourished, and surveyed the ruins of ancient
magnificence, of which even the ruins cannot long be visible,
unless some care be taken to preserve them; and where is the
pleasure of preserving such mournful memorials? They have been
till very lately so much neglected, that every man carried away the
stones who fancied that he wanted them.
The cathedral, of which the foundations may be still traced, and a
small part of the wall is standing, appears to have been a spacious
and majestick building, not unsuitable to the primacy of the
kingdom. Of the architecture, the poor remains can hardly exhibit,
even to an artist, a sufficient specimen. It was demolished, as is
well known, in the tumult and violence of Knox's reformation.
Not far from the cathedral, on the margin of the water, stands a
fragment of the castle, in which the archbishop anciently resided.
It was never very large, and was built with more attention to
security than pleasure. Cardinal Beatoun is said to have had
workmen employed in improving its fortifications at the time when
he was murdered by the ruffians of reformation, in the manner of
which Knox has given what he himself calls a merry narrative.
The change of religion in Scotland, eager and vehement as it was,
raised an epidemical enthusiasm, compounded of sullen
scrupulousness and warlike ferocity, which, in a people whom
idleness resigned to their own thoughts, and who, conversing only
with each other, suffered no dilution of their zeal from the
gradual influx of new opinions, was long transmitted in its full
strength from the old to the young, but by trade and intercourse
with England, is now visibly abating, and giving way too fast to
that laxity of practice and indifference of opinion, in which men,
not sufficiently instructed to find the middle point, too easily
shelter themselves from rigour and constraint.
