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R. F. Murray-His Poems with a Memoir-Part2_ANDREW LANG(1844-1912)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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mace is still extant) and with gorgeous furniture and cloth of gold.

St. Leonard's was founded by Prior Hepburn in 1512. Of St.



Salvator's the ancient chapel still remains, and is in use. St.

Leonard's was merged with St. Salvator's in the last century: its



chapel is now roofless, some of the old buildings remain, much

modernised, but on the south side fronting the gardens they are



still picturesque. Both Colleges were, originally, places of

residence for the students, as at Oxford and Cambridge, and the



discipline, especially at St. Leonard's, was rather monastic. The

Reformation caused violent changes; all through these troubled ages



the new doctrines, and then the violent Presbyterian pretensions to

clerical influence in politics, and the Covenant and the Restoration



and Revolution, kept busy the dwellers in what should have been

`quiet collegiate cloisters.' St. Leonard's was more extreme, on



Knox's side, than St. Salvator's, but was also more devoted to King

James in 1715. From St. Andrews Simon Lovat went to lead his



abominable old father's clan, on the Prince Regent's side, in 1745.

Golf and archery, since the Reformation at least, were the chief



recreations of the students, and the archery medals bear all the

noblest names of the North, including those of Argyll and the great



Marquis of Montrose. Early in the present century the old ruinous

college buildings of St. Salvator's ceased to be habitable, except



by a ghost! There is another spectre of a noisy sort in St.

Leonard's. The new buildings are mere sets of class-rooms, the



students live where they please, generally in lodgings, which they

modestly call bunks. There is a hall for dinners in common; it is



part of the buildings of the Union, a new hall added to an ancient

house.



It was thus to a university with ancient associations, with a

religio loci, and with more united and harmonious student-life than



is customary in Scotland, that Murray came in 1881. How clearly his

biographer remembers coming to the same place, twenty years earlier!



how vivid is his memory of quaint streets, grey towers, and the

North Sea breaking in heavy rollers on the little pier!



Though, like a descendant of Archbishop Sharp, and a winner of the

archery medal, I boast myself Sancti Leonardi alumnus addictissimus,



I am unable to give a description, at first hand, of student life in

St. Andrews. In my time, a small set of `men' lived together in



what was then St. Leonard's Hall. The buildings that remain on the

site of Prior Hepburn's foundation, or some of them, were turned



into a hall, where we lived together, not scattered in bunks. The

existence was mainly like that of pupils of a private tutor; seven-



eighths of private tutor to one-eighth of a college in the English

universities. We attended the lectures in the University, we



distinguished ourselves no more than Murray would have approved of,

and many of us have remained united by friendship through half a



lifetime.

It was a pleasant existence, and the perfume of buds and flowers in



the old gardens, hard by those where John Knox sat and talked with

James Melville and our other predecessors at St. Leonard's, is



fragrant in our memories. It was pleasant, but St. Leonard's Hall

has ceased to be, and the life there was not the life of the free



and hardy bunk-dwellers. Whoso pined for such dissipated pleasures

as the chill and dark streets of St. Andrews offer to the gay and



rousing blade, was not encouraged. We were very strictly `gated,'

though the whole society once got out of window, and, by way of



protest, made a moonlight march into the country. We attended

`gaudeamuses' and solatia--University suppers--but little; indeed,



he who writes does not remember any such diversions of boys who beat

the floor, and break the glass. To plant the standard of cricket in



the remoter gardens of our country, in a region devastated by golf,

was our ambition, and here we had no assistance at all from the



University. It was chiefly at lecture, at football on the links,




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