The City Of St. Andrews, When It Had Lost Its Archiepiscopal Pre-
Eminence, Gradually Decayed:
One of its streets is now lost; and
in those that remain, there is silence and solitude of inactive
indigence and gloomy depopulation.
The university, within a few years, consisted of three colleges,
but is now reduced to two; the college of St. Leonard being lately
dissolved by the sale of its buildings and the appropriation of its
revenues to the professors of the two others. The chapel of the
alienated college is yet standing, a fabrick not inelegant of
external structure; but I was always, by some civil excuse, hindred
from entering it. A decent attempt, as I was since told, has been
made to convert it into a kind of green-house, by planting its area
with shrubs. This new method of gardening is unsuccessful; the
plants do not hitherto prosper. To what use it will next be put I
have no pleasure in conjecturing. It is something that its present
state is at least not ostentatiously displayed. Where there is yet
shame, there may in time be virtue.
The dissolution of St. Leonard's college was doubtless necessary;
but of that necessity there is reason to complain. It is surely
not without just reproach, that a nation, of which the commerce is
hourly extending, and the wealth encreasing, denies any
participation of its prosperity to its literary societies; and
while its merchants or its nobles are raising palaces, suffers its
universities to moulder into dust.
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