habits of our students were tainted by this incidental peculiarity, and its social effect must now be matter of tradition.

It can easily, however, be believed that the revolting preliminary which the votary of science had to undergo must have had an influence on his habits very far from propitious. The nocturnal expedition was occasionally joined by those who had not the excuse of scientific ardour, and thus the influence of the practice spread beyond the limits of the medical profession. The mysterious horrors surrounding the reputation of such a pursuit were not without a certain fascination to the young gownsmen, and some of them were supposed placidly to cultivate rather than suppress charges which would have seriously alarmed their more knowing and practical seniors. Though there was thus a good deal of exaggeration and boasting both from without and from within, yet the practice did exist among the senior students, while at the same time an occasional junior, approved for his boldness and discretion, might be admitted to act a subordinate part in a "resurrectionising affair." Possibly he, if not the others, might find it necessary to employ some stimulant to brace his nerves for the formidable work in hand. Thus the adventure which provided the theatre of anatomy with the means of keeping a few students at hard work in one of the most important departments of human knowledge, had probably occasioned more than one night of fierce dissipation, and produced scenes which would have considerably astonished the good old aunts, deprecating the exhausting labours of their virtuous nephews in the nasty hospitals and that horrid dissecting-room.

The excesses which concentrated themselves around this solemn and cheerless pursuit, ramified themselves into others of a more fantastic and cheerful character. Probably it is all changed now; but they are not very old men who remember how the smaller university towns were subject to fantastic superficial revolutions. Trees, gates, railings, street lamps, summerhouses, shop signs, and other "accessories of the realty," as lawyers call them, disappearing or

changing places like the shifting of the side-slips in a theatre. Perhaps there may even be alive some who have witnessed or participated in such divertisements. Is there any one who will admit participation in that transmutation which scandalised the bailie, by exhibiting his suburban mansion under the auspices of the national achievement, as "licensed to sell spirits, porter, and ale," just at the moment when the licentiate of the Red Lion was lamenting the disappearance of his insignia? Are none of those virtuous youths alive, who called next day to express their horror of the deed, and hold confidential communion with the bailie, thus obtaining access to his arsenal, and receiving the comfortable secret information-valuable for future conduct

that the blunderbuss, the musket, and the brace of pistols, were loaded with powder only, "but he wad warrant the scounrels wad get a fleg"? Who was it, we wonder, that, on the myrmidons of justice coming to his chambers, under the well-warranted suspicion that he possessed an extensive and varied collection of shop signs, had recourse to his incipient Scripture knowledge by an apt quotation in reference to those who seek what they do not succeed in obtaining? Is it probable that in any private neuks in old dwellinghouses there may exist relics of those prized museums not acquired without toil and risk-and exhibited with much caution only to trusted friends-which consisted mainly of watchmen's rattles and battered lanterns? Lives there yet one of that laborious group, who wished to illuminate the mansion of Professor Blanc in proper style, and to that effect carried out a cluster of street lamps, and planted them all a-light in his garden, so encountering labour and risk with no better reward than a reflection on the professor's puzzled countenance when he should awaken and behold the phenomenon? N.B. Street lamps in those days were fed with oil, and were supported on wooden posts, which it was not difficult for a couple of strong youths to uproot.

But we are shocking the virtue and civilisation of the age by such queries.

They hint at practices which we believe to be entirely eschewed by the superior class of young gentlemen who now frequent our universities. If we have created a throb of terror in an amiable parent's breast, we humbly beg his pardon. He may take our word for it that his hopeful son is incapable of such pranks. This is mainly an antiquarian article, and the matter contained in it belongs more or less to the past, and is founded on document or tradition.

The semi-monastic foundations by which the students live under the discipline of colleges or halls, and assemble together at a common table, are indissolubly connected in English notions with the idea of a university. Yet the system arose as an adjunct to the original universities, and, as late inquirers have shown, the parasites have so overrun the parent stem that its original character is scarcely perceptible beneath their more luxuriant growth. The origin of these institutions is simple enough. When the great teachers brought crowds of young men together from all parts of Europe, the primary question was how they were to obtain food and shelter? and a second arose when these needs were supplied - how could any portion of the discipline of the parental home be administered to them among strangers? Certain privileges were given to the houses inhabited by the students, and streets and quarters sprung up for their accommodation, as we now see the rows of red-tiled cottages sprout forth like lichens around the tall chimney of a new manufactory. To prevent fluctuation, and preserve the academic character wherever it had once established itself, it was a frequent regulation that the houses once inhabited by students could be let to no other person so long as the rents were duly paid. We find traces of this expedient in the records of Glasgow, where there seems to have been great difficulty in accommodating the students of the infant university, on account of the extreme smallness of the town. Since the house once occupied by the student was thenceforth dedicated to his order, speculators were induced to build entirely with a view to the accommodation of

a certain number of young men living in celibacy, and they naturally imitated the example set them in the construction of monasteries. The edifice and its use thus suggested something like the monastic disciplineand, indeed, an establishment filled with young men, having their separate dormitories and common table, yet without any head or system of discipline among them, would have been a social anomaly of the most formidable character. The university required to give its sanction to the well ordering of the separate institutions thus rising around it. At the same time munificent patrons of learning left behind them endowments for founding such institutions, indicating at the same time the method in which the founders desired that they should be governed, and appointing a portion of the funds to form stipendiary allowances to office-bearers. So arose those great colleges and halls which in England have buried the original constitution of the university beneath them.

In the great Continental universities which contained separate colleges, these were more strictly under the central control. In Scotland, the wealth at the disposal of the academic institutions, and the numbers attending them, were never sufficiently great to encourage the rise of separate bodies, either independent or subordinate. The system of monastic residence and a common table was adopted under the authority of the university, but it is remarkable that while so many of the fundamental features of the original institution have been preserved, this subsidiary arrangement has totally disappeared. The indications of its existence, however, as they are preserved in the records, have naturally considerable interest as vestiges of a social condition which has passed from the earth.

In the Glasgow Records we have, of date 1606, a contract with Andrew Henderson touching the Boarding of the Masters and Bursars, commencing thus: "At Glasgow, the twentytwa day of October, the year of God Jm VJe and aucht yeares: it is appoyntit and aggreit betwix the pairties following, viz., Mr Patrick Schairp, Principal of the College of

cracy of Scotland, apparently in as ample a proportion as those of England are now to be found at Oxford and Cambridge. Thus, in an inventory of occupied rooms, apparently in one floor, the aristocratic element has a decided preponderance in the nomenclature "Lord James's chamber, Francis Montgomerie's chamber, Kilmarnock's chamber, Richard Elphinstone's chamber, George Smyth's chamber, James Fleming's chamber, Joseph Gill's chamber, James Simson's chamber."*

It is not perhaps generally known that the practice of a common table was continued in St Andrews down to about the year 1820. In evidence before the University Commission in 1827, Dr Hunter stated that "there were two public tables; one of them, the higher table, was attended only by boarders, and by the bursars on the Ramsay mortification; the board was high, and the entertainment altogether was better: the other was the bursars' table. The college was induced to contract with an economist or provisor to supply both tables; and if the boards fell short, or if the expense increased from the articles of subsistence being dearer than ordinary in any year, or exceeded the amount allowed by the contract, the College often compensated to him that loss." Having thus offered some notices of the col

legiate system in its full vitality, and traced it to its last lurking-place, we cannot help giving a place to the significant reflections which have occurred to the editor of the Glasgow Records on the extinction of the system.

"In all the universities in Scotland, the old collegiate life, so favourable for scholastic discipline, has been abandoned. Perhaps the increasing numbers rendered living in college under the masters' eye inconvenient; though some modification of the systems of living in the universities and the great schools of England might meet the difficulty. The present academic life in Scotland brings the master and the student too little in contact, and does not enable the teacher to educate in that which is more important than scholastic learning, nor to study and train the temper, habits, and cha

racter. If the alternative which has been chosen inferred that the student enjoyed the benefit of parental or domestic care when out of the lecture-room, the change might be less objectionable; but when we observe the crowds of young men brought from distant homes to our gether uncontrolled, except in the classuniversities, living at large and altoroom, we may look back with some regret to the time when the good regent of a university, living among his pupils, came in the parent's place as well as the master's.

"But it was not only the discipline of the university that was benefited by the collegiate life. The spirit of fellowship that existed among young men set apart for the common object of high education, was on the whole favourable, though liable to exaggeration, and often running into prejudice. Nearly all that common feeling of the youth of a great university is gone. The shreds of it that are preserved by the dress, scarcely honoured in the crowded streets of a great city, and the rare occurrence of a general meeting of students, serve only to suggest to what account it might be turned for exciting the enthusiasm and raising the Scotland. If such collections as the prestandard of conduct among the youth of sent, in revealing the old machinery of the scholar life, tend in any degree to the renewal of the bond of common feeling among the younger students, and of sympathy with their teachers, they will

not be useless."

We were led towards the vestiges of the collegiate system by the observation, that while in England it had overshadowed and concealed the ori

ginal outline of the universities, it had in Scotland disappeared, leaving the primitive institutions in their original loneliness. When we contemplate, with this recollection, the decayed remains of the older universities, it will be seen that they were not so inferior in wealth and magnificence to those of our neighbours, as the mass of collegiate institutions which these have gathered around the primitive university might lead one to suppose. Undoubtedly Christ Church and King's Chapel are fine buildings; but the remains of the chapels of St Salvator at St Andrews, and of King's College in Aberdeen, are not to be despised. Of the for

mer, alas! there are little more than the truncated walls and buttresses, with here and there a decoration to show what the edifice was when it stood forth in all its symmetry. Near the end of last century a suspicion was entertained that the roof was decayed and would fall. So groundless was the supposition, that after the workmen who were removing it had gone too far to recede, they found that they could not take it to pieces, but must first weaken its connection with the wall plates, and let it fall plump down. Of course it smashed to atoms nearly every interior ornament, and it just left enough of the marble tomb of its founder, Bishop Kennedy, to let us see what a marvellous group of richly-cut Gothic work it must have originally been. Within it there were found, among other ornaments, a heavy silver mace of Parisian workmanship, wonderful as the tomb itself for the quaint intricacy of its workmanship.

The chapel of King's College has fared better. Like a modest northern wild-flower, its beauties are hidden from the common gaze of the peering tourist, but to the adepts who examine them they are of no ordinary character. From the difficulty of working the indigenous granite, and the cost of importing freestone, the Gothic builders of this district seem to have been frugal in their stone decorations, so that the glory of King's College consists in its interior woodwork of carved oak, worked in architectural forms, like fairy masonry. We question if there is anywhere a collection of specimens of Gothic fretwork more varied and delicate.

It is difficult to conceive anything more depictive of high and daring educational aspirations than the planting of this beautiful edifice in so distant a spot, as the place of worship of those students who were to flock to it from the wild hills and dreary moors of the north. Its founder was Bishop Elphinston, an ardent scholar, a traveller, and a frequenter of the Continental universities, who might rather have been expected, had he followed the dictates of his refined tastes instead of his conscientious convictions, and his zeal for the spread of learning, to have spent his days among the Continental

scholars, than to have carried their learning across the Grampians. The character of the foundation may be derived from the following abstract of the Bull of erection of 1495, prefixed to the Spalding edition of the Fasti Aberdonienses.

"Bull of Pope Alexander VI., issued on the petition of James IV., King of Scots, which sets forth that the north parts of his kingdom were inhabited by a rude, illiterate, and savage people, and therefore erecting in the City of Old Aberdeen a 'Studium Generale' and University, as well for theology, canon and civil law, medicine, and the liberal arts, as for any other lawful faculty, to be there studied and taught by ecclesiastical and lay Masters and Doctors, in the same manner as in the Studia Generalia' of Paris and Bologna, and for conferring on deserving persons the degrees of Bachelor, Licentiate, Doctor, Master, and all other degrees and honourable distinctions; conferring on William, Bishop of Aberdeen, and his successors, the office of Chancellor, empowering them, or, during the vacancy of the See, the Vicar deputed by the Chapter, to confer these degrees in all the faculties on such well-behaved scholars as shall, after due examination, be deemed fit by the Rector, Regents, Masters, or Doctors of the faculty in which the degree is sought; granting to such graduates full power of teaching in this or any other studium, without any other examination; giving power to the Chancellor or his Vicar, the Rector for the time, and the resident Doctors, with the assistance of a competent number of Licentiates in each faculty, and of circumspect scholars of the said studium, and of two of the King's Councillors at the least, to make statutes for the good government thereof; and conferring on the students and graduates thereof all the privileges and immunities of any other University. February, 1494-5."

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The character of the institution, and the extent to which it embodied the matured practices of the foreign universities, will be more amply understood by a document, dated a few years later, in the shape of a collegiate endowment by the Bishop, applicable, along with the foundation of a certain Duncan Scherar, to thirty-six members.

"Of the foresaid thirty-six persons, five to be Masters of Arts and Students of Theology, exercising the functions of the priesthood, and daily acting as read