STUDENT LIFE IN SCOTLAND.

If the latest lingering summer tourist in Scotland should perchance delay his departure until he is driven southward by the chill evenings of November, he may chance to see arising around him, in some considerable town, a race of young men, whose loose robes, varying from the brightest of fresh scarlet to the sombrest hue which years of bad usage can bestow on that gay colour, attract him as peculiar and funny, and as, on the whole, a phenomenon provocative of inquiry. He is told that the session has begun, and these are the students of the university. The information will perhaps be surprising to him, whoever he be: if he be an Oxonian or Cantab, a sneer of derision will perhaps curve his lips when he remembers the gentleman commoners, and tufted noblemen, who crowd the streets of his Alma Mater in haughty exclusiveness and unmeasured contempt of the citizen class, who evidently have no respect whatever for the scarlet gown men of poor Scotland. Indeed, the luxurious academic ease, the placid repose of dignified scholarship, are strangers to these wearers of the flowing toga. It is evident that many of them have felt the pinch of poverty. No pliant gyp attends the toilet, or lays forth the table for the jovial â€œnight-cap.â€ Hard work and hard fare are their portion, and their raiment shows that they have been rubbed roughly against the world, instead of being set apart from its toils and cares and vulgar turmoil in aristocratic isolation. Some of the gowns are bright and new, indeed, and the faces in which they culminate are ruddy, fresh, and warm. Yet the youths endowed in these blushing honours seem not to exult therein, but rather to give place to the hard-featured brethren, whose threadbare togas bear the grim marks of mud and soot, or hang in tatters like a beggarâ€™s cloak. The truth is, that the wear and tear of the gown is held indicative of advancement in the academic curriculum, and is rather encouraged than avoided. And of those who wear it, many, though they may have been sufficiently tutored in the economy of their more serviceable clothing, have not made acquisitions in the school of finery, or acquired a weakness for decorative vanity. We remember an instance of a hard-featured mountaineer, who afterwards rose to distinction in an abstruse department of science, being charged by his fellow-students with having so far desecrated the gown as to have perambulated the streets with a barrow hawking potatoes, by the cry of â€œTatiesâ€”taties!â€ He admitted the commercial part of the charge, but denied the admixture of potato-vender and student by the desecration of the robes. He was careful to put off his gown while he cried â€œtaties.â€

With all these and other indications of poverty, there is something to our eyes extremely interesting in the Scottish universities, as relics preserved through all changes in dynasties, constitutions, and ecclesiastical polities, through poverty, neglect, and enmity, of the original characteristics of the university system, as it existed in all its grandeur of design in the middle ages.

A collection of remarkable papers, now before us, opens up and presents, in valuable and full light, the progress of a portion of our Scottish universities. They consist of two works of that class commonly called â€œClub Books.â€ The one is a collection of records and other documents connected with the University of Glasgow, printed under the auspices of the Maitland Club; the other a â€œFasti Aberdonenses,â€ appropriately collected by that northern association which, in honour of the Cavalier annalist of â€œThe Troubles,â€ is called the â€œSpalding Club.â€ Both works are edited with that peculiar archÃ¦ological strictness which has been applied to this class of documents, through the special skill of Mr Cosmo Innes. They are both edited by him, with some partial aid, in the case of the Glasgow documents, from his ablest coadjutor in Scottish archÃ¦ology, Mr Joseph Robertson. These volumes form a very apt supplement to that collection of ecclesiastical records which, arranged and printed under the same able management, are an honour to our country. With the exception of their curious and agreeable prefaces, neither the chartularies nor the volumes before us profess to be readable books. They are collections of records, and must have all the substantial dryness of records. But then they contain in themselves the materials of the social and incidental history of the classes of persons to which they refer, and contain imbedded within them the materials of instruction, both valuable and curious. With some labour we have driven shafts through their strata, and we may have occasion to lay before our readers a few of the specimens we have excavatedâ€”confining ourselves, in the mean time, to the characteristics developed by the collection of documents.

The direction of these is chiefly to show how thoroughly these remote institutions partook in the great system of the European universities, and how many of its vestiges they still retain. The forms, the nomenclature, and the usages of the middle ages are still preserved, though some of them have naturally changed their character with the shifting of the times. Each university has still its chancellor, and sometimes a high State dignitary accepts of the office. It was of old a very peculiar one, for it was the link which allied the semi-republican institutions of the universities to the hierarchy of St Peter. The bishop was almost invariably the chancellor, unless the university were subordinated to some great monastic institution, when its head was the chancellorâ€”as in Paris the Prior of St Genevieve exercised the high office. In the Scottish universities the usual Continental arrangement seems to have been adopted prior to the Reformationâ€”as a matter of course, the bishop was the chancellor.

But while the institution was thus connected through a high dignitary with the Romish hierarchy, it possessed, as a great literary community with peculiar privileges, its own great officer electively chosen for the preservation of those privileges. It had its rector, who, like the chief magistrate of a municipal corporation, but infinitely above him in the more illustrious character of the functions for which his constituents were incorporated, stood forth as the head of his republic, and its protector from the invasions either of the subtle churchmen or the grasping barons. The rector, indeed, was the concentration of that peculiar commonwealth which the constitution of the ancient university prescribed. Sir William Hamilton has shown pretty clearly that, in its original acceptation, the word Universitas was applied, not to the comprehensiveness of the studies, but to that of the local and personal expansion of the institution. The university despised the bounds of provinces, and even nations, and was a place where ardent minds from all parts of the world met to study together, and impart to each other the influence of collective intellect working in combination and competition. The constitution of the rectorship was calculated to provide for the protection of this universality, for the election was managed by the procurators or proctors of the nations or local bodies into which the students were divided, generally for the purpose of neutralising the naturally superior influence of the home students, and keeping up the cosmopolitan character imparted to the system by its enlightened founders. Hence in Paris the nations were France, Picardy, and England, afterwards changed to Germany, in which Scotland was included. Glasgow is still divided into four nations: the Natio Glottiana, or Clydesdale, taken from the name given to the river by Tacitus. In the Natio Laudoniana were originally included the rest of Scotland, but it was found expedient to place the English and the colonists within it; while Albania, intended to include Britain south of the Forth, has been made rather inaptly the nation of the foreigners. Rothesay, the fourth nation, includes the extreme west of Scotland and Ireland. In Aberdeen there is a like division into Marenses, or inhabitants of Mar, Angusiani or men of Angus, which we believe includes the whole world south of the Grampians as the Angusiani, while the northern districts are partitioned into Buchanenses and Moravienses.

The procurators of the nations were, in the University of Paris, those high authorities to whom, as far separated from all sublunary influences, King Henry of England proposed, in the twelfth century, to refer his disputes with the Papal power. In England they are represented at the present day by the formidable proctor, who is a terror to evil-doers without being any praise or protection to them that do well. But it may safely be said that the chubby youths who in Glasgow and Aberdeen go through the annual ceremony, asprocuratores nationum, of representing the votes of the nations in the election of a rector, more legitimately represent those procurators of the thirteenth and fourteenth century, who maintained the rights of their respective nations in the great intellectual republic called a Universitas. The discovery, indeed, of this latent power, long hidden, like some palÃ¦ontological fossil, under the pedagogical innovations of modern daysâ€”which tended to make the self-governing institution a school ruled by mastersâ€”created astonishment in all quarters, even in those who found themselves in possession of the privilege. In Aberdeen especially, when some mischievous antiquary maintained that by the charter the election of a lord rector lay with the students themselves, the announcement was received with derision by a discerning public, and with a severe frown, as a sort of seditious libel, enticing the youth to rebellion, by the indignant professors. But it turned out to be absolutely true, however astounding it might be to those who are unacquainted with the early history of universities, and think that everything ancient must have been tyrannical and hierarchical. The young ones made a sort of saturnalia of their fugitive power, while the professors looked on as one may see a solemn mastiff contemplate the gambols of a litter of privileged spaniel pups. The privilege was, however, used effectively, we may say nobly. There has been no fogyism, or adherence to any settled routine of humdrum respectability, in the selection of the rectors. From Burke to Bulwer Lytton and Macaulay, they have, with a few exceptions, been men of the first intellectual rank. What is a still more remarkable result than that they should often have been men of genius, there is scarcely an instance of a lord rector having been a clamorous quack or a canting fanatic.

In Edinburgh there is no such relic of the ancient university commonwealth, and the students have instinctively supplied the want by affiliating their voluntary societies, and choosing a distinguished man to be the president of the aggregate group. The constitution of the College of Edinburgh, indeed, was not matured until after the old constitution of the universities had suffered a reaction, and, far from any new ones being constructed on the old model, the earlier universities with difficulty preserved their constitution. Some person called a College Bailie is the dignitary who presides over the interests of the University of Edinburgh as one of the appendages of the Town Council. By that body the greater part of the patronage of the institution is administered, and now it is decided that they have the sole and absolute right of making bye-laws for the regulation of this, the leading educational institution of Scotland. There is something transcendently ludicrous in a civic corporationâ€”a conclave of demure tradesmen, intensely respectableâ€”extending those functions of administration which are appropriately applicable to marketing and street-cleaning to the direction and adjustment of the highest ranges of human instruction. Yet somehow it has worked well, on account of the very anomaly involved in it. The town-councillors, in selecting a professor, like the students in choosing a rector, are afraid of their own powers, and never venture to use their own discretion. Absolutely ignorant of the branches of knowledge to which the rules they frame apply, they become a medium through which these rules are moulded by others, and a certain commercial sagacity enables them to divine who are the most sagacious advisers. So also in the exercise of their patronage, being utterly unable to test the capacity of a candidate, they dare not give way to any partiality founded at least on this ground, and they are generally acute enough to find out who is most highly estimated by those who are competent to judge.

That principle of internal self-action and independence of the contemporary constituted powers, of which the rectorship and some other relics remain to us at this day, is one of the most remarkable, and in many respects admirable, features in the history of the middle ages. It is involved in mysteries and contradictions which one would be glad to see unravelled by skilful and full inquirers. Adapted to the service of pure knowledge, and investing her with absolute prerogatives, the system was yet one of the creatures of that Romish hierarchy, which at the same time thought by other efforts to circumscribe human inquiry, and make it the servant of her own ambitious efforts.

It may help us in some measure to the solution of the phenomenon to remember that, however dim the light of the Church may have shone, it was yet the representative of the intellectual system, and was in that capacity carrying on a war with brute force. Catholicism was the great rival and controller of the feudal strength and tyranny of the ageâ€”informe ingens cui lumen ademptum. As intellect and knowledge were the weapons with which they encountered the sightless colossus, it was believed that the intellectual arsenals could not be too extensive or completeâ€”that intellect could not be too richly cultivated. Like many combatants, they perhaps forgot future results in the desire of immediate victory, and were for the moment blind to the effect so nervously apprehended by their successors, that the light thus brought in by them would illuminate the dark corners of their own ecclesiastical system, and lead the way to its fall. Perhaps such hardy intellects as Abelard or Aquinas may have anticipated such a result from the stimulus given by them to intellectual inquiry, and may not have deeply lamented the process.

But however it came aboutâ€”whether in the blindness of all, or the far-sightedness of someâ€”the Church, from the thirteenth to pretty far on in the fifteenth century, encouraged learning with a noble reliance and a zealous energy which it would ill become the present age to despise or forget. And even if it should all have proceeded from a blind confidence that the Church placed on a rock was unassailable, and that mere human wisdom, even trained to the utmost of its powers, was, after all, to be nothing but her handmaiden, let us respect this unconscious simplicity which enabled the educational institutions to be placed in so high and trusted a position. The Church supplied something then, indeed, which we search after in vain in the present day, and which we shall only achieve by some great strides in academic organisation, capable of supplying from within what was then supplied from without: and the quality thus supplied was no less than that cosmopolitan nature, which made the university not merely parochial, or merely national, but universal, as its name denoted. The temporal prince might endow the academy with lands and riches, and might confer upon its members honourable and lucrative privileges, but it was to the head of the one indivisible Church that the power belonged of franking it all over Christendom, and establishing throughout the civilised world a free-masonry of intellect, which made all the universities, as it were, one great corporation of the learned men of the world.

It must be admitted that we have here one of those practical difficulties which form the necessary price of the freedom of Protestantism. When a great portion of Europe was no longer attached to Rome, the peculiar centralisation of the educational systems was broken up. The old universities, indeed, retained their ancient privileges in a traditional, if not a practically legal shape, through Lutheranism and Calvinism carrying the characteristics of the abjured Romanism, yet carrying them unscathed, since they were protected from injury and insult by the enlightened object for which they were established and endowed. When, however, in Protestant countries, the old universities became poor, or when a change of condition demanded the foundation of a new university, it was difficult to restore anything so simple and grand as that old community of privileges which made the member of one university a citizen of all others, according to his rank, whether he were laureated in Paris or distant Upsalaâ€”in the gorgeous academies close to the fostering influence of the Pope, or in that humble edifice endowed after the model of the University of Bologna, in an obscure Scottish town named Glasgow.

The English universities, by their great wealth and political influence, were able to stand alone, neither giving nor taking. Their Scottish contemporaries, unable to fight a like battle, have had reason to complain of their ungenerous isolation; and as children of the same parentage, and differing only with their southern neighbours in not having so much worldly prosperity, it is natural that they should look back with a sigh, which even orthodox Presbyterianism cannot suppress, to the time when the universal mental sway of Rome, however offensive it might be in its own insolent supremacy, yet exercised that high privilege of supereminent greatness to level secondary inequalities, and place those whom it favoured beyond the reach of conventional humiliations.

To keep up that characteristic which the Popedom only offered, the monarchs of the larger Protestant states have endeavoured to apply the incorporation principle to universities. In small states and republics the difficulty of obtaining a general sanction to frank their honours to any distance from the place where they are given is still greater; yet it is in such places that, through fortunate coincidents, an academy sometimes acquires a widespread reputation and influence. To what eminence the universities in the United States are destined who shall predict? yet, in the estimate of many, they have no right to be called universities at all; and of the doctorsâ€™ degrees which they freely distribute in this country, much doubt is entertained of the genuineness. Yet if it would be difficult to lay down how it is that these American institutions have acquired any power to grant degreesâ€”that is to say, the power not only to confer prizes and rewards among their own alumni, but to invest them with insignia of literary rank current for their value over the worldâ€”it would be equally difficult for any of the ancient universities in Protestant states to claim an exclusive right to such a power, since this could only be done through Papal authority. It will be said that there is just the same practical difficulty in this as in all other departments of human institutions, and especially those which, like rank, are transferable from country to country, so as to require and obtain an estimate of their value in each. It will be said that the exclusiveness which denies the Heidelberg Doctor of Philosophy a parallel with the LL.D. of Oxford is just the same as that which will by no means admit the count or baron who is deputy-assistant highways controller, as on a par with an earl or baron in the peerage of England. The Kammer Junker of Denmark is not looked on as a privy-councillor. The Sheriff of Mecca, the Sheriff of London, and the Sheriff of Edinburgh, are three totally different personages, and would feel very much puzzled how to act if they were to change places for a while. Some Eastern dignitariesâ€”Baboo, Fudky, and the like, must occasionally puzzle even the adepts of Leadenhall. Nor are we without our instances near at hand. What is the Knight of Kerry, what the Captain of Clanranald, what The Chisholmâ€”and how do the authorities at the Heraldâ€™s Office deal with them? Has not an Archbishop of York been suspected of imposture in a Scottish bank when he signed with the surname of Eborac; and have not our Scottish judges, with their strange-sounding peerage-titles, made mighty confusion in respectable English hotels, when my Lord Kames is so intimate with Mrs Home, and my Lord Auchinleck retires with Mrs Boswell? But admitting the confusion to be irremediable in the department of political and decorative rank, the absence of a uniform intellectual hierarchy is not the less to be regretted, while the great effort made to secure it in an early and imperfect condition of society should be contemplated with a respectful awe. There is just one man who professes to be able effectually to restore itâ€”the sage of positivism, M. Comte; and he is to do it when he has established absolute science in everything, and put down freedom of opinion by the application of sure scientific deduction in every department of the worldâ€™s intellectual pursuits; when it shall be as impossible to question the most abstruse propositions in chemistry, geology, or social organisation, as to question the multiplication table or the succession of the tidesâ€”then, indeed, may absolute laws be laid down to govern the world in its appreciation of intellectual rank. But it is long yet ere that day of certain knowledgeâ€”if it is ever destined to dawn on that poor, blundering, unfortunate fellow, man. We have got but a very, very little way yet, and we know not how much farther it is permitted us to penetrate. Terrible are the chaotic heaps that have to be cleared away or set in order by the pioneers of intellect, and it is still a question whether our race can provide those who are strong-headed enough for the task.

There is much truth, however, at the foundation of the French sageâ€™s audacious speculations, that intellect must achieve for herself her own conquests and take her own position. In the greatness of the acquirements of which they are the nursery, must we look hereafter to the greatness of our seminaries of learning. If the university is but a grammar school or a collection of popular lecture-rooms, no royal decrees or republican ordinances will give it rankâ€”if it be a great centre of literary and scientific illumination, the pride or enmity of its rivals will not tarnish its lustre. But apart from, the question between catholicity and positivity, it is, we think, very interesting to notice in our universitiesâ€”humble as we admit them to beâ€”the relics of the nomenclature and customs which, in the fifteenth century, marked their rank in the great European cluster of universities. The most eminent of their characteristics is that high officer, the Rector, already spoken of. There is a Censor tooâ€”but for all the grandeur of his etymological ancestry in Roman history, he is but a small officerâ€”in stature sometimes, as well as dignity. He calls over the catalogue or roll of names, marking those absentâ€”a duty quite in keeping with that enumerating function of the Roman officer which has left to us the word census as a numbering of the people.

So lately as the eighteenth century, when the monastic or collegiate system which has now so totally disappeared from the Scottish universities yet lingered about them, the censor was a more important, or at least more laborious officer, and, oddly enough, he corresponded in some measure with the character into which, in England, the Proctor had been so strangely diverted. In a regulation adopted in Glasgow, in 1725, it is provided â€œthat all students be obliged, after the bells ring, immediately to repair to their classes, and to keep within them, and a censor be appointed to every class, to attend from the ringing of the bells till the several masters come to their classes, and observe any, either of his own class or of any other, who shall be found walking in the courts during the above time, or standing on the stairs, or looking out at the windows, or making noise.â€â€”Munimenta Univ. Glasguensis, ii. 429. This has something of the mere schoolroom characteristic of our modern university discipline, but this other paragraph, from the same set of regulations, is indicative both of more mature vices among the precocious youth of Glasgow, and a more inquisitorial corrective organisation:â€”

â€œThat for keeping order without the College, a censor be appointed to observe any who shall be in the streets before the bells ring, and to go now and then to the billiard-tables, and to the other gaming-places, to observe if any be playing at the times when they ought to be in their chambers; and that this censor be taken from the poor scholars of the several classes alternately, as they shall be thought most fit for that office, and that some reward be thought of for their pains.â€ (Ibid., 425). In the fierce street-conflicts, to which we may have occasion to refer, the poor censors had a more perilous service.

In the universities of Central Europe, and that of Paris, their parent, the censor was a very important person; yet he was the subordinate of one far greater in power and influence. In the words of the writers of theTrevaux, so full of knowledge about such matters, â€œUn RÃ©gent est dans sa classe comme un Souverain; il crÃ©e des charges deCenseurscomme il lui plait, il les donne Ã qui il veut, et il les abolit quand il le judge Ã propos.â€ The regents still exist in more than their original potency; for they are that essential invigorating element of the university of the present day, without which it would not exist. Of old, when every magister was entitled to teach in the university, the regents were persons selected from among them, with the powers of government as separate from the capacity and function of instructing; at present, in so far as the university is a school, the regent is a schoolmasterâ€”and therefore, as we have just said, he is an essential element of the establishment. The term regent, like most of the other university distinctions, was originally of Parisian nomenclature, and there might be adduced a good deal of learning bearing on its signification as distinct from that of the word professorâ€”now so desecrated in its use that we are most familiar with it in connection with dancing-schools, jugglersâ€™ booths, and veterinary surgeries. The regency, as a university distinction conferred as a reward of capacities shown within the arena of the university, and judged of according to its republican principles, seems to have lingered in a rather confused shape in our Scottish universities, and to have gradually ingrafted itself on the patronage of the professorships. So in reference to Glasgow, immediately after the Revolution, when there was a vacancy or two from Episcopalians declining to take the obligation to acknowledge the new Church Establishment, there appears the following notice:â€”

â€œJanuary 2, 1691.â€”There had never been so solemn and numerous an appearance of disputants for a regentâ€™s place as was for fourteen days before this, nine candidates disputing; and in all their disputes and other exercises they all behaved themselves so well, as that the Faculty judged there was not one of them but gave such specimens of their learning as might deserve the place, which occasioned so great difficulty in the choice that the Faculty, choosing a leet of some of them who seemed most to excel and be fittest, did determine the same by lot, which the Faculty did solemnly go about, and the lot fell upon Mr John Law, who thereupon was this day established regent.â€â€”Ibid., vol. iii. p. 596.

Sir William Hamilton explains the position of the regents with a lucid precision which makes his statement correspond precisely with the documentary stores before us. â€œIn the original constitution of Oxford,â€ he says, â€œas in that of all the older universities of the Parisian model, the business of instruction was not confided to a special body of privileged professors. The University was governed, the University was taught, by the graduates at large. Professor, master, doctor, were originally synonymous. Every graduate had an equal right of teaching publicly in the University the subjects competent to his faculty and to the rank of his degree; nay, every graduate incurred the obligation of teaching publicly, for a certain period, the subjects of his facultyâ€”for such was the condition involved in the grant of the degree itself. The bachelor, or imperfect graduate, partly as an exercise towards the higher honour, and useful to himself, partly as a performance due for the degree obtained, and of advantage to others, was bound to read under a master or doctor in his faculty a course of lectures; and the master, doctor, or perfect graduate, was in like manner, after his promotion, obliged immediately to commence (incipere), and to continue for a certain period publicly to teach (regere), some at least of the subjects appertaining to his faculty. As, however, it was only necessary for the University to enforce this obligation of public teaching, compulsory on all graduates during the term of theirnecessary regency, if there did not come forward a competent number ofvoluntary regentsto execute this function; and as the schools belonging to the several faculties, and in which alone all public or ordinary instruction could be delivered, were frequently inadequate to accommodate the multitude of the inceptors, it came to pass that in these universities the original period of necessary regency was once and again abbreviated, and even a dispensation from actual teaching during its continuance commonly allowed. At the same time, as the University only accomplished the end of its existence through its regents, they alone were allowed to enjoy full privileges in its legislature and government; they alone partook of itsbeneficiaandsportulÃ¦. In Paris the non-regent graduates were only assembled on rare and extraordinary occasions: in Oxford the regents constituted the house of congregation, which, among other exclusive prerogatives, was anciently the initiatory assembly through which it behoved that every measure should pass before it could be admitted to the house of convocation, composed indifferently of all regents and non-regents resident in the University.â€â€”Dissertations, p. 391â€“2.

But the term Regent became afterwards obsolete in the southern universities, while it continued by usage to be applied to a certain class of professors in our own. Along with other purely academic titles and functions, it fell in England before the rising ascendancy of the heads and other functionaries of the collegiate institutionsâ€”colleges, halls, inns, and entries. So, in the same way, evaporated the faculties and their deans, still conspicuous in Scottish academic nomenclature. In both quarters they were derived from the all-fruitful nursery of the Parisian University. But Scotland kept and cherished what she obtained from a friend and ally; England despised and forgot the example of an alien and hostile people. The Decanus seems to have been a captain or leader of tenâ€”a sort of tything-man; and Ducange speaks of him as a superintendent of ten monks. He afterwards came into general employment as a sort of chairman and leader. TheDoyensof all sorts, lay and ecclesiastical, were a marked feature of ancient France, as they still are of Scotland, where there is a large body of lay deans, from the eminent lawyer who presides over the Faculty of Advocates down to â€œmy feyther the deacon,â€ who gathers behind a half-door the gear that is to make his son a capitalist and a magistrate. Among the Scottish universities the deans of faculty are still nearly as familiar a title as they were at Paris or Bologna.

The employment in the universities of a dead language as the means of communication was not only a natural arrangement for teaching the familiar use of that language, but it was also evidently courted as one of the tokens of learned isolation from the common illiterate world. In Scotland, as perhaps in some other small countries, such as Holland, the Latin remained as the language of literature after the great nations England, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, were making a vernacular literature for themselves. In the seventeenth century the Scot had not been reconciled to the acceptance of the English tongue as his own; nor, indeed, could he employ it either gracefully or accurately. On the other hand, he felt the provincialism of the Lowland Scottish tongue, the ridicule attached to its use in books which happened to cross the Border, and the narrowness of the field it afforded to literary ambition.

Hence every man who looked to be a worker in literature or science, threw himself into the academic practice of cultivating the familiar use of the Latin language. To the Scottish scholars it was almost a revived language, and they possessed as great a command over it as can ever be obtained of a language confined to a class, and not universally used by the lowest as well as the highest of the people. Hence, when he had the pen in hand, the educated Scotsman felt the Latin come more naturally to his call than the vernacular; and people accustomed to rummage among old letters by Scotsmen will have sometimes noticed that the writer, beginning with his native tongue, slips gradually into the employment of Latin as a relief, just as we may find a foreigner abandon the arduous labour of breaking English, to repose himself in the easy fluency of his natural speech. We believe that no language, employed only by a class, is capable of the same copiousness and flexibility as that which is necessarily applicable to all purposes, from the meanest to the highest. But such as a class-language could become, the Latin was among the Scots; and it is to their peculiar position and academic practices that, among a host of distinguished humanists, we possess in George Buchanan the most illustrious writer in the Roman tongue, both in poetry and prose, since the best days of Rome.

The records before us afford some amusing instances of the anxious zeal with which any lapse into the vernacular tongue was prevented, and conversation among the students was rendered as uneasy and unpleasant as possible. In the visitorial regulations of Kingâ€™s College, Aberdeen, in 1546, it is provided that the attendant boysâ€”the gyps, if we may so call themâ€”shall be expert in the use of Latin, lest they should give occasion to the masters or students to have recourse to the vernacular speech: â€œNe dent occasionem magistris et Studentibus lingua vernacula uti.â€ If Aberdeen supplied a considerable number of waiting-boys thus accomplished, the stranger wandering to that far northern region, in the seventeenth century, might have been as much astonished as the man inIgnoramus, who tested the state of education in Paris by finding that even the dirty boys in the streets were taught French. It would, after all, have perhaps been more difficult to find waiting-boys who could speak English. The term by which they are described is a curious indication of the French habits and traditions of the northern universities: they are spoken of asgarcionesâ€”a word of obvious origin to any one who has been in a French hotel.

In Glasgow, in a law passed in 1667, it is provided that â€œall who are delated by the public censor for speaking of English shall be fined in an halfpennytoties quoties.â€ The sum is not large, but the imposition of the penalty at that particular juncture looks rather unreasonable, since the Senate and the Faculty of Arts had just abandoned the use of Latin in their public documents, and had adopted what, if not strictly English, was the vernacular tongueâ€”a change which was doubtless as much to their own ease as it is to the satisfaction of the reader, who becomes painfully alive to the continued and progressive barbarisation of the academic Latin.

In a great measure, however, it seems to have been less the object in view to inculcate Latin than to discountenance the vernacular language of the country. In some instances the language of France is admitted; and, from the number of Scotsmen who carved out their fortunes in that hospitable and affluent country, this acquisition must have been one of peculiar value. In a set of statutes and laws of the Grammar School of Aberdeen, adopted in 1553, there is a very singular liberty of choiceâ€”the pupils might speak in Greek, Hebrew, or even in Gaelic, rather than in Lowland Scots: â€œLoquantur omnes LatinÃ¨, GrÃ¦cÃ¨, HebraicÃ¨, GallicÃ¨, HybernicÃ¨â€”nunquam vernaculÃ¨, saltem cum his qui LatinÃ¨ noscunt.â€ This is by no means to be held as an indication of the familiar acquaintance of the Aberdonian students with the language of the Gael; on the contrary, it shows how entirely this was placed within the category of foreign tongues. We know no other instances in which the tongue of the Highlander is spoken of in connection with the earlier educational institutions of the country; but we think it not improbable that any encouragement it received was for much the same reason that Hindostanee and the African dialects are now sometimes taught to young divinesâ€”that they may work as missionaries among the heathen. A few students from this wild region, to which Christianity had scarcely penetrated, were indeed a peculiar feature of the educational institutions of Aberdeen, and in a modified shape so remain to this day, since some wild men from the hills, spending a brief period at school or college to acquire a fragment of education, are yet known by the termextranni, of old applied to them. There is a prevailing, but utterly false impression, that Aberdeen is in the Highlands. It lingers chiefly, in the present century, with Cockneys beginning their first northern tour; but in the seventeenth century it may, perhaps, have been entertained even in the metropolis of Scotland. Hence the educational institutions there, though at the extremity of a long tract of agricultural lowland, inhabited by a Teutonic people, and farther separated from the actual Celtic line than Edinburgh itself, are generally talked of in old documents as those which are peculiarly available for the civilisation of the Highlanders. Glasgow was nearer and more accessible to the great body of the western Celts; but in this town the prejudices against them were greater, and the alienation, especially in religion, was more emphatic. It was to Aberdeen then, generally, that the son of a predatory chief would be sent, to fit him in some measure for converse with the civilised world, such as it then was; and the fierce owner of a despotic power over his clansmen would appear among the sober burgesses of the northern metropolis much as an American chief may among the inhabitants of some distant city in the Union. Lovat studied at Kingâ€™s College, in Aberdeen, and there acquired a portion of those accomplishments which made him act the subtle courtier in Paris or London, and reserve his sanguinary ruffianism for Castle Dunie. Not unmindful of the benefits of the institution, some of the Celtic princes bestowed endowments on it. Thus, the Laird of Macintosh, who begins in the true regal style, â€œWe, Lachlan Macintosh of that ilk,â€ and who calls himself the Chief andPrincipallof the Clan Chattanâ€”probably using the term which he thought would be the most likely to make his supremacy intelligible to university dignitariesâ€”dispenses to the Kingâ€™s College two thousand marks, â€œfor maintaining hopeful students thereat.â€ He reserves, however, a dynastic control over the endowment, making it conducive to the clan discipline and the support of the hierarchy surrounding the chief. It was a condition that the beneficiary should be presented â€œby the lairds of Macintosh successively in all time coming; that a youth of the name of Macintosh or of Clan Chattan shall be preferred to those of any other name,â€ &c.â€”Fasti, 206. This document is titled in the records, â€œMacintoshâ€™s Mortification,â€ according to a peculiar technical application of that expression in Scotland, to the perpetuity of possession which in England is termed mortmain. Later in the eighteenth century, Mâ€˜Lean of Coll causes another mortification to be â€œapplied towards the maintenance and education of such young man or boy of the name of Mâ€˜Lean as shall be recommended by me, or my heirs or successors on the estate of Coll.â€ This is probably the same Highland potentate who frowned so savagely on young Colman, when he, seeing an old gentleman familiarly called Coll by his contemporaries, addressed him as Mr Coll. Such a solecism would never be permitted to pass as an accidental mistake, since it would be utterly impossible to convince the mighty chief of Coll that there existed in this world a person ignorant enough to be unacquainted with his style and title. At a still later date, a bequest is more gracefully made by Sir John Mâ€˜Pherson: â€œIn testimony of my gratitude to the University of Old Aberdeen, I bequeath to ditto, so as to afford an annual bursary to any Highland student who may be selected to receive the said bursary, two thousand five hundred pounds of my Carnatic stock.â€

Here there is a wider range of application, but still the endowment is to a Highland student. Nor, after all, when the social state of the Highlanders is considered, can we wonder that their gentry should seek to preserve the wealth which they are constrained to deposit in the hands of the stranger for their own people. Occasionally, at the present day, some wild wiry Mâ€˜Lean or Mâ€˜Dougal makes his appearance, by command of the chief, at the proper time and place, to claim investment in the clan bursary. Other of these endowments are of restricted application, being exclusively appropriated to students of a special name, such as Smith or Thomson, or born in a special parish, or descended from members of some corporation. In general, however, these endowmentsâ€”some of them of very ancient dateâ€”are open to free universal competition, and are in this shape one of the most interesting and remarkable specimens of the ancient literary republics, in which each man fought with his brains, and held what his brains could achieve for him. Annually, at the competition for bursaries in Aberdeen, there assembles a varied group of intellectual gladiatorsâ€”long red-haired Highlanders, who feel trousers and shoes an infringement of the liberty of the subjectâ€”square-built Lowland farmersâ€”flaxen-haired Orcadians, and pale citizensâ€™ sons, vibrating between scholarship and the tailorâ€™s board or the shoemakerâ€™s last. Grim and silent they sit for a day, rendering into Latin an English essay, and drop away one by one, depositing with the judges the evidence of success or failure as the case may be. The thing is very fairly and impartially managed, and honourable to all the parties concerned.

It is indeed, as we have hinted, a relic of the old competitive spirit which distinguished the universities as literal republics of letters, where each man fought his own battle, and gained and wore his own laurels. Nor was his arena confined to his own college. The free-masonry we have already alluded to opened every honour and emolument to all, and the Scotsman might suddenly enter the lists at Paris, Bologna, or Upsala, or the Spaniard might compete in Glasgow or Aberdeen. The records before us contain many forms in which the ancient spirit has now ceased to breathe. Already has been mentioned the competition for the regentship. The old form of the Impugnment of Theses, so renowned in literary histories, has died away as a portion of the ordinary laureation. The comprehensive challenges and corresponding victories attributed to the Admirable Crichton give this practice a peculiar interest in the eyes of Scotsmen; and it has a great place in the annals of the Reformation, since one of its main stages was the posting the twenty-five theses on the door of the church of WÃ¼rtemberg by Luther. But in reading these remarkable events people are apt to forget the commonness of the practice; and Crichton has the aspect of a preposterous intellectual bully going out of his proper way to attract notice, instead of doing what was in its time and circumstances as ordinary and common sense an act as running a tilt, joining a crusade, or burning a witch. Goldsmith, in that account of the intellectual vagabond which so evidently describes himself, has noticed some relics of the practice as he found it on the Continent. â€œIn all the universities and convents there are, upon certain days, philosophical theses maintained against every adventitious disputant; for which, if the champion opposes with any dexterity, he can claim a gratuity in money, a dinner, and a bed for one night. In this manner, then, I fought my way towards England.â€ A collection of German pamphlets, amounting, it is said, to upwards of a hundred thousand, and called the Dietrich Collection, was some years ago purchased by the Faculty of Advocates, and was found to consist chiefly of the academic theses in which the scholars of Germanyâ€”illustrious and obscureâ€”had been disputing for centuries. In the same place, by the way, where this vast collection reposes, may be found the most complete living illustration of the old form of impugnment. The anxious litigant or busy agent entering the main door of the Parliament House at 9 oâ€™clock of a morning, may find, by anafficheto the door-post, that there is to be adisputatio juridicaunder the auspices of theinclytus Diaconus facultatis. Since the year 1693 it has been the practice of each intrant to undergo public impugnment, or, as the act of Faculty says, â€œthe publict tryall of candidates, by printing and publishing theses on the subject assigned with corollaries, as it is observed amongst other nations.â€ A title of the Pandects is assigned on each occasion. Thus the Faculty possesses more than one running commentary upon that celebrated collection; and it has always been deemed remarkable that, considering the number and varied talent of the authors of these theses, they should be so uniform in their Latinity and structure. A great innovation has lately taken place in sparing the cost of printing the theses, and applying the amount so saved to the Facultyâ€™s magnificent library.

Many of the old university theses are very interesting as the youthful efforts of men who have subsequently become eminent. Those connected with Aberdeen are apparently the most numerous. It is very noticeable, indeed, that in the remote rival institutions there established, the spirit and practice of the Continental universities, in almost every department, had their most tenacious existence. As in England, the Church of Rome was succeeded there, not by Presbyterianism but Episcopacy, and there were fewer changes in all old habits and institutions. The celebrated â€œAberdeen doctors,â€ who carried on a controversy with the Covenanters, met their zealous religionists with something like the old pedantic formality of the academic system of disputation. They resolved the Covenant into a thesis, and impugned it. Of this remarkable group of scholars we have the following notice in Professor Innesâ€™s Preface:â€”

â€œTheir names are now little known, except to the local antiquary; but no one who has even slightly studied the history of that disturbed time is unacquainted with the collective designation of â€˜the Aberdeen Doctorsâ€™ bestowed upon the learned â€˜queristsâ€™ of the ultra-Presbyterian Assembly of 1638, and the most formidable opponents of the Solemn League and Covenant.

â€œOf these learned divines, Dr Robert Barron had succeeded Bishop Forbes in his parish of Keith, and from thence was brought on the first opportunity to be made Minister of Aberdeen, and afterwards Professor of Divinity in Marischal College. He is best judged by the estimation of his own time, which placed him foremost in philosophy and theology. Bishop Sydserf characterises him as â€˜vir in omni scholastica theologia et omni literatura versatissimus:â€™ â€˜A person of incomparable worth and learning,â€™ says Middleton, â€˜he had a clear apprehension of things, and a rare facultie of making the hardest things to be easily understood.â€™[10]Gordon of Rothiemay says, â€˜He was one of those who maintained the unanswerable dispute (in 1638) against the Covenante, which drew upon him both ther envye, hate, and calumneyes; yet so innocently lived and dyed hee, that such as then hated him doo now reverence his memorye, and admire his works.â€™ Principal Baillie, of the opposite party, speaks of him as â€˜a meek and learned person,â€™ and always with great respect: and Bishop Jeremy Taylor, when writing in 1659 to a fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, recommending the choice of books for â€˜the beginning of a theological library,â€™ named two treatises of Barronâ€™s especially, and recommended generally â€˜everything of his.â€™[11]That a man so honoured for his learning and his life should receive the indignities inflicted on Barron after his death, is rather to be held as a mark of the general coarseness of the time, than attributed to the persecuting spirit of any one sect.[12]

â€œAnother of the Aberdeen doctors, William Leslie, was successively Sub-principal and Principal of Kingâ€™s College. The visitors of 1638 found him worthie of censure, as defective and negligent in his office, but recorded their knowledge that he was â€˜ane man of gude literature, lyff, and conversatioun.â€™[13]â€˜He was a man,â€™ says James Gordon, â€˜grave, and austere, and exemplar. The University was happy in having such a light as he, who was eminent in all the sciences above the most of his age.â€™[14]

â€œDr James Sibbald, Minister of St Nicholas, and a Regent in the University, is recorded by the same contemporary: â€˜It will not be affirmed by his very enemyes, but that Dr James Sibbald was ane eloquent and painefull preacher, a man godly, and grave, and modest, not tainted with any vice unbeseeming a minister, to whom nothing could in reason be objected, if you call not his ante-covenanting a cryme.â€™[15]Principal Baillie, while condemning his Arminian doctrines, saysâ€”â€˜The man was, there, of great fame.â€™

â€œDr Alexander Scroggy, minister in the Cathedral Church, first known to the world as thought worthy to contribute to the â€˜Funeralsâ€™ of his patron and friend, Bishop Forbes,[16]is described in 1640 by Gordon as â€˜a man sober, grave, and painefull in his calling;â€™[17]and by Baillie as â€˜ane old man, not verie corrupt, yet perverse in the Covenant and Service-book.â€™ His obstinacy yielded under the weight of old age and the need of rest, but he is not the more respected for the questionable recantation of all his early opinions.[18]

â€œForemost, by common consent, among that body of divines and scholars, was John Forbes, the good bishopâ€™s son. He had studied at Kingâ€™s College, and, after completing his education in the approved manner by a round of foreign universities, returned to Scotland to take his doctorâ€™s degree, and to be the first professor in the chair of theology, founded and endowed in our University by his father and the clergy of the diocese. Dr John Forbesâ€™s theological works have been appreciated by all critics and students, and have gone some way to remove the reproach of want of learning from the divines of Scotland. His greatest undertaking, theInstructiones historico-theologicÃ¦, which he left unfinished, Bishop Burnett pronounces to be â€˜a work which, if he had finished it, and had been suffered to enjoy the privacies of his retirement and study to give us the second volume, had been the greatest treasure of theological learning that perhaps the world has yet received.[19]

â€œThese were the men whom the bishop drew into the centre and heart of the sphere which he had set himself to illuminate; and in a short space of time, by their united endeavours, there grew up around their Cathedral and University a society more learned and accomplished than Scotland had hitherto known, which spread a taste for literature and art beyond the academic circle, and gave a tone of refinement to the great commercial city and its neighbourhood.

â€œIt must be confessed cultivation was not without bias. It would seem that, in proportion as the Presbyterian and Puritan party receded from the learning of some of their first teachers, literature became here, as afterwards in England, the peculiar badge of Episcopacy. With Episcopacy went, hand in hand, the high assertion of royal authority; and influenced as it had been by Bishop Patrick Forbes and his followers, Aberdeen became, and continued for a century to be, not only a centre of northern academic learning, but a little stronghold of loyalty and Episcopacyâ€”the marked seat of high Cavalier politics and anti-Puritan sentiments of religion and church government.

â€œThat there was a dash of pedantry in the learning of that Augustan age of our University, was the misfortune of the age, rather than peculiar to Aberdeen. The literature of Britain and all Europe, except Italy, was still for the most part scholastic, and still to a great degree shrouded in the scholastic dress of a dead language; and we must not wonder that the northern University exacted from her divines and philosophers, even from her historians and poets, that they should use the language of the learned. After all, we owe too much to classical learning to grudge that it should for a time have overshadowed and kept down its legitimate offspring of native literature. â€˜We never ought to forget,â€™ writes one worthy to record the life and learning of Andrew Melville, â€˜that the refinement and the science, secular and sacred, with which modern Europe is enriched, must be traced to the revival of ancient literature, and that the hid treasures could not have been laid open and rendered available but for that enthusiasm with which the languages of Greece and Rome were cultivated in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.â€™[20]

â€œIt is not to be questioned that in the literature of that age, and in all departments of it, Aberdeen stood pre-eminent. Clarendon commemorates the â€˜many excellent scholars and very learned men under whom the Scotch universities, and especially Aberdeen, flourished.â€™[21]â€˜Bishop Patrick Forbes,â€™ says Burnet, â€˜took such care of the two colleges in his diocese, that they became quickly distinguished from all the rest of Scotland.... They were an honour to the Church, both by their lives and by their learning; and with that excellent temper they seasoned that whole diocese, both clergy and laity, that it continues to this very day very much distinguished from all the rest of Scotland, both for learning, loyalty, and peaceableness.â€™[22]

â€œThat this was no unfounded boast, as regards one department of learning, has been already shown, in enumerating the learned divines who drew upon Aberdeen the general attention soon after the death of their bishop and master. In secular learning it was no less distinguished. No one excelled Robert Gordon of Straloch in all the accomplishments that honour the country gentleman. Without the common desire of fame or any more sordid motive, he devoted his life and talents to illustrate the history and literature of his country. He was the prime assistant to Scotstarvet in his two great undertakings, the Atlas and the collections of Scotch poetry.[23]The maps of Scotland in the Great Atlas (many of them drawn by himself, and the whole â€˜revisedâ€™ by him at the earnest entreaty of Charles I.), with the topographical descriptions that accompany them, are among the most valuable contributions ever made by an individual to the physical history of his country. His son, James Gordon, parson of Rothiemay, followed out his fatherâ€™s great objects with admirable skill, and in two particulars he merits our gratitude even more. He was one of the earliest of our countrymen to study drawing, and to apply it to plans and views of places; and, while he could wield Latin easily, he condescended to write the history of his time in excellent Scotch.

â€œWhile these writers were illustrating the history of their country in prose, a crowd of scholars were writing poetry, or, at least, pouring forth innumerable copies of elegant Latin verses. While the two Johnstons were the most distinguished of those poets of Aberdeen, John Leech, once Rector of our University,[24]David Wedderburn, rector of the Grammar School, and many others, wrote and published pleasing Latin verse, which stands the test of criticism. While it cannot be said that such compositions produce on the reader the higher effects of real poetry, they are not without value, if we view them as tests of the cultivation of the society among which they were produced. Arthur Johnston not only addresses elegiacs to the bishop and his doctors, throwing a charming classical air over their abstruser learning, but puts up a petition to the magistrates of the city, or celebrates the charms of Mistress Abernethy, or the embroideries of the Lady Lauderdaleâ€”all in choice Latin verse, quite as if the persons whom he addressed appreciated the language of the poet.[25]

â€œIntelligent and educated strangers, both foreigners and the gentry of the north, were attracted to Aberdeen; and its colleges became the place of education for a higher class of students than had hitherto been accustomed to draw their philosophy from a native source.[26]

â€œIf it was altogether chance, it was a very fortunate accident, which placed in the midst of a society so worthy of commemoration a painter like George Jamiesone, the pupil of Rubens, the first, and, till Raeburn, the only great painter whom Scotland had produced. Though he was a native of Aberdeen, it is not likely that anything but the little court of the bishop could have induced such an artist to prosecute his art in a provincial town. An academic orator in 1630, while boasting of the crowd of distinguished men, natives and strangers, either produced by the University, or brought to Aberdeen by the bishop, was able to point to their pictures ornamenting the hall where his audience were assembled. Knowing by whom these portraits were painted, we cannot but regret that so few are preserved.â€[27]

Keeping, however, to the matter of academic impugnment, we shall now turn to an instance of its incidental occurrence in that University, which, from its late origin, was least imbued with the spirit of the Continental system.

The visit of King James to his ancient kingdom in 1617, afforded the half-formed collegiate institution in Edinburgh an opportunity for a rhetorical display, which ended in substantial advantages. Tired with business at Holyrood, and in the enjoyment of full eating and drinking, and â€œdriving ourâ€ at his quieter palace of Stirling, he bethought himself of a rhetorical pastime with the professors of the new University, wherein he could not fail to luxuriate in the scholastic quibbling with which his mind was so well crammed, and he was pretty certain of enjoying an ample banquet of success and applause. Hence, as Thomas Crawford the annalist of the institution informs us, â€œIt pleased his majesty to appoint the maisters of the college to attend him at Sterling the 29th day of July, where, in the royal chapel, his majesty, with the flower of the nobility, and many of the most learned men of both nations, were present, a little before five of the clock, and continued with much chearfulness above three hours.â€

The display was calculated to be rather appalling to any man who had much diffidence or reserve in his disposition, and hence Charteris, the principal, â€œbeing naturally averse from public show, and professor of divinity,â€ transferred the duty of leading the discussion to Professor Adamson. The form adopted was the good old method of the impugnment of theses, so many being appointed to defend, and so many to impugn; â€œbut they insisted only upon such purposes as were conceived would be most acceptable to the kingâ€™s majesty and the auditory.â€

The first thesis was better suited for the legislature than an academic body, and there must have been some peculiar reason for bringing it on. It was, â€œthat sheriffs and other inferior magistrates should not be hereditary,â€ which was oppugned by Professor Lands â€œwith many pretty arguments.â€ The king was so pleased with the oppugnation, that he turned to the Marquis of Hamilton, hereditary sheriff of Clydesdale, and said, â€œJames, you see your cause lostâ€”and all that can be said for it clearly satisfied and answered.â€N.â€”B.It is just worth noticing that the College and the Marquis were then at feud. There was a question about the possession of the old lodging of the Hamilton family, then constituting a considerable portion of the University edifices. The â€œgud old nobleman,â€ his father, had been easily satisfied, but the young man was determined to stand upon his rights, and, though he could not recover possession, get something in the shape of rent or damages; nor would he take the judicious hint that â€œso honourable a personage would never admit into his thoughts to impoverish the patrimony of the young University, which had been so great an ornament, and so fruitful an instrument of so much good to the whole nation, but rather accept of some honourable acknowledgment of his munificence in bestowing upon the College an honest residence for the muses.â€ But to return to the impugnment. The next thesis was on local motion, â€œpressing many things by clear testimonies of Aristotleâ€™s text;â€ and this passage of literary arms called out one of Jamesâ€™s sallies of pawky persiflage. â€œThese men,â€ he said, â€œknow Aristotleâ€™s mind as well as himself did while he lived.â€ The next thesis was on the â€œOriginal of Fountains;â€ and the discussion, much to the purpose, no doubt, was so interesting that it was allowed to go on far beyond the prescribed period, â€œhis majesty himself sometimes speaking for the impugner, and sometimes for the defender, in good Latin, and with much knowledge of the secrets of philosophy.â€

Talking is, however, at the best, dry work. His majesty went at last to supper, and no doubt would have what is termed â€œa wet night.â€ When up to the proper mark, he sent for the professors, and delivered himself of the following brilliant address:â€”

â€œMethinks these gentlemen, by their very names, have been destined for the acts which they have had in hand to-day. Adam was father of all; and, very fitly, Adamson had the first part of this act. The defender is justly called Fairlyâ€”his thesis had some fair lies, and he defended them very fairly, and with many fair lies given to the oppugners. And why should not Mr Lands be the first to enter the lands? but now I clearly see that all lands are not barren, for certainly he hath shown a fertile wit. Mr Young is very old in Aristotle. Mr Reed needs not be red with blushing for his acting to-day. Mr King disputed very kingly, and of a kingly purpose, anent the royal supremacy of reason over anger and all passions.â€ And here his majesty was going to close the encomiums, when some one nudged his elbow, and hinted that he had omitted to notice the modest Charteris; but the royal wit was not abashed, and his concluding impromptu was by no means the least successful of his puns. â€œWell, his name agreeth very well to his nature; for charters contain much matter, yet say nothing, but put great purposes in menâ€™s mouths.â€

Few natures would be churlish enough to resist a genial glow of satisfaction on receiving such pearls of rhetoric scattered among them by a royal hand, and we may believe that the professors were greatly gratified. But, pleased more probably by his own success, the king gave a more substantial mark of his satisfaction, and said, â€œI am so well satisfied with this dayâ€™s exercise, that I will be godfather to the College of Edinburgh, and have it called the College of King James; for after the founding of it had been stopped for sundry years in my minority, so soon as I came to any knowledge, I zealously held hand to it, and caused it to be established; and although I see many look upon it with an evil eye, yet I will have them to know that, having given it this name, I have espoused its quarrel.â€ And further on in the night, he promised, â€œthat as he had given the College a name, he would also, in time convenient, give it a royal godbairn gift for enlarging the patrimony thereof.â€

In the course of the multifarious talk of the evening, a curious and delicate matter was opened upâ€”the difference between the English pronunciation of Latin and the Scottish, which corresponds with that of Europe in general. An English doctor, who must have enjoyed exceptional opinions, or been a master of hypocrisy, praised the readiness and elegancy of his majestyâ€™s Latinity; on which he said, â€œAll the world knows that my maister, Mr George Buchanan, was a great maister in that faculty. I follow his pronunciation both of Latin and Greek, and am sorry that my people of England do not the like, for certainly their pronunciation utterly spoils the grace of these two learned languages; but you see all the university and learned men of Scotland express the true and native pronunciation of both.â€[28]

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