are their blessed Governors in the mean time? Are they all fast asleep?"[1] The young Etonian, Bishop Berkeley's grandson, had the merit of putting an end to this bad practice. On entrance he was required to deposit a crown for window-money; when, model of virtue as he was, he objected that he had never yet broken a window in his life, and was not likely to begin, he was assured that he would before he left St. Andrews. The College porter, who collected "these window-croons," told him of a poor student who had shed tears on being called on to pay. His father, a cottar, had sold one of his three cows to find money for his education at the university, and had sent him up with a large tub of oatmeal, a pot of salted butter, and five shillings in his pocket. Sixpence of this money had already been spent, and the rest the porter took.[2] When the window-breaking time came on, and Berkeley was summoned to take his part in the riot, he refused. As a boy at Eton, he said, though sometimes with more wine in his head than was good for him, he had never performed such a valiant feat, and he was not therefore going to begin as a young man. His comrades yielded to his remonstrances, and the windows were no longer broken.[3]
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.[4] 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
- ↑ Wesley's Journal, iv. 77.
- ↑ Berkeley and his friend, the young Laird of Kincaldrum, raised "a very noble subscription" for the poor lad.
- ↑ G. M. Berkeley's Poems, p. cccxlviii.
- ↑ "On my observing to Dr. Johnson that some of the modern libraries of the university were more commodious and pleasant for study [than the library of Trinity College], as being more spacious and airy, he replied, 'Sir, if a man has a mind to prance, he must study at Christ Church and All Souls.'" Boswell's Johnson, ii. 67, n. 2.
