ues 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.

Of the two colleges yet standing, one is by the institution of its
founder appropriated to Divinity. It is said to be capable of containing
fifty students; but more than one must occupy a chamber. The library,
which is of late erection, is not very spacious, but elegant and
luminous.

The doctor, by whom it was shewn, hoped to irritate or subdue my English
vanity by telling me, that we had no such repository of books in England.

Saint Andrews seems to be a place eminently adapted to study and
education, being situated in a populous, yet a cheap country, and
exposing the minds and manners of young men neither to the levity and
dissoluteness of a capital city, nor to the gross luxury of a town of
commerce, places naturally unpropitious to learning; in one the desire of
knowledge easily gives way to the love of pleasure, and in the other, is
in danger of yielding to the love of money.

The students however are represented as at this time not exceeding a
hundred. Perhaps it may be some obstruction to their increase that there
is no episcopal chapel in the place. I saw no reason for imputing their
paucity to the present professors; nor can the expence of an academical
education be very reasonably objected. A student of the highest class
may keep his annual session, or as the English call it, his term, which
lasts seven months, for about fifteen pounds, and one of lower rank for
less th