St. Andrews indeed has formerly suffered more atrocious ravages and more
extensive destruction, but recent evils affect with greater force. We
were reconciled to the sight of archiepiscopal ruins. The distance of a
calamity from the present time seems to preclude the mind from contact or
sympathy. Events long past are barely known; they are not considered. We
read with as little emotion the violence of Knox and his followers, as
the irruptions of Alaric and the Goths. Had the university been
destroyed two centuries ago, we should not have regretted it; but to see
it pining in decay and struggling for life, fills the mind with mournful
images and ineffectual wishes.




ABERBROTHICK


As we knew sorrow and wishes to be vain, it was now our business to mind
our way. The roads of Scotland afford little diversion to the traveller,
who seldom sees himself either encountered or overtaken, and who has
nothing to contemplate but grounds that have no visible boundaries, or
are separated by walls of loose stone. From the bank of the Tweed to St.
Andrews I had never seen a single tree, which I did not believe to have
grown up far within the present century. Now and then about a
gentleman's house stands a small plantation, which in Scotch is called a
policy, but of these there are few, and those few all very young. The
variety of sun and shade is here utterly unknown. There is no tree for
either shelter or timber. The oak and the thorn is equally a stranger,
and the whole country is extended in uniform nakedness, except that in