At St. Mary’s College Johnson was shown the fine library which had been finished within the last few years. Dr. Murison, the Principal, was abundantly vain of it, for he seriously said to him, “You have not such a one in England.” Johnson, though he has his laugh at the Doctor for hoping “to irritate or subdue his English vanity,” yet admits that if “it was not very spacious, it was elegant and luminous.” It is not, of course, to be compared with the largest libraries at Oxford. “If a man has a mind to prance” it is not at St. Andrews, but at Christ Church and All Souls, that he must study.[481] Nevertheless it confers great dignity on the University, and with its 120,000 volumes there is no English College that it would disgrace. Murison’s vanity had therefore some excuse. He was, however, a man “barely sufficient” for the post which he held. Over his slips in Latin the lads sometimes made merry. In the Divinity Hall he one day rebuked a student for delivering a discourse which was too high-flown and poetical. “Lord help him, poor man!” said the indignant youngster, “He knows no better.”[482]
[Illustration: ST. MARY’S COLLEGE LIBRARY.]
On the second day of our travellers’ stay “they went,” says Boswell, “and saw Colonel Nairne’s garden and grotto. Here was a fine old plane tree.[483] Unluckily the Colonel said there was but this and another large tree in the country.[484] This assertion was an excellent cue for Dr. Johnson, who laughed enormously, calling to me to hear it.” The Colonel’s father, Lord Nairne, had been “out in the ’45,” while the son, who fought in the King’s army, had been sent to batter down the old castle of his forefathers. George II. wished to reward his fidelity with the command of a regiment, but was hindered by the Duke of Cumberland, “who told the King that it was impossible that a man who had suffered so much could ever forget or forgive it.”[485] His garden and grotto were at the back of the Chapel. The grotto has disappeared with its “petrified stocks of trees,” unless perchance some remains of it are seen in a small building, which looks like a private chapel, and which might have been transformed by that ingenious collector of curiosities, the Colonel. The plane tree survived till about the beginning of the century. An old gentleman still living was told by his grandfather that in the branches a wooden platform had been built, on which tea-parties were held.[486] I remember seeing in my boyhood a similar platform in a large willow-tree overhanging Isaac Walton’s sedgy Lea. That the good people of St. Andrews have not in their traditions made Johnson drink a dozen or two cups of tea in this airy summer-house is a proof either of their truthfulness or of the sluggishness of their imagination.