Part 5

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 “that 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.”—_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:—

“That 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.” (_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 the _Trevaux_, so full of knowledge about such matters, “Un Régent est dans sa classe comme un Souverain; il crée des charges de _Censeurs_ comme il lui plait, il les donne à qui il veut, et il les abolit quand il le judge à propos.” 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 schoolmaster—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 professor—now so desecrated in its use that we are most familiar with it in connection with dancing-schools, jugglers’ 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:—

“_January 2, 1691._—There had never been so solemn and numerous an appearance of disputants for a regent’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.”—_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. “In the original constitution of Oxford,” he says, “as 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 faculty—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 their _necessary regency_, if there did not come forward a competent number of _voluntary regents_ to 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 its _beneficia_ and _sportulæ_. 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.”—_Dissertations_, p. 391–2.

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 institutions—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 ten—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. The _Doyens_ of 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 “my feyther the deacon,” 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 King’s College, Aberdeen, in 1546, it is provided that the attendant boys—the gyps, if we may so call them—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: “_Ne dent occasionem magistris et Studentibus lingua vernacula uti._” 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 in _Ignoramus_, 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 as _garciones_—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 “all who are delated by the public censor for speaking of English shall be fined in an halfpenny _toties quoties_.” 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 tongue—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 choice—the pupils might speak in Greek, Hebrew, or even in Gaelic, rather than in Lowland Scots: “Loquantur omnes Latinè, Græcè, Hebraicè, Gallicè, Hybernicè—nunquam vernaculè, saltem cum his qui Latinè noscunt.” 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 divines—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 term _extranni_, 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 King’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, “We, Lachlan Macintosh of that ilk,” and who calls himself the Chief and _Principall_ of the Clan Chattan—probably using the term which he thought would be the most likely to make his supremacy intelligible to university dignitaries—dispenses to the King’s College two thousand marks, “for maintaining hopeful students thereat.” 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 “by 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,” &c.—_Fasti_, 206. This document is titled in the records, “Macintosh’s Mortification,” 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, M‘Lean of Coll causes another mortification to be “applied towards the maintenance and education of such young man or boy of the name of M‘Lean as shall be recommended by me, or my heirs or successors on the estate of Coll.” 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 M‘Pherson: “In 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.”

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 M‘Lean or M‘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 endowments—some of them of very ancient date—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 gladiators—long red-haired Highlanders, who feel trousers and shoes an infringement of the liberty of the subject—square-built Lowland farmers—flaxen-haired Orcadians, and pale citizens’ sons, vibrating between scholarship and the tailor’s board or the shoemaker’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 Würtemberg 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. “In 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.” 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 Germany—illustrious and obscure—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 o’clock of a morning, may find, by an _affiche_ to the door-post, that there is to be a _disputatio juridica_ under the auspices of the _inclytus 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, “the publict tryall of candidates, by printing and publishing theses on the subject assigned with corollaries, as it is observed amongst other nations.” 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 Faculty’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 “Aberdeen doctors,” 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 Innes’s Preface:—