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.

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