"HEATH'S COURT, OTTERY ST. MARY, MY DEAR PROFESSOR SHAIRP—I have to thank you very sincerely for your kindness in sending me a copy of your essay on the author of The Christian Year. I need not tell you again what I think of it. I am very glad that it is put into a form in which it may not only obtain more general currency, but a sure enduring place in our literature; it deserves the latter, and may do much good in the former respect. I hope you will not give up your design in respect of the papers on Wordsworth and Coleridge—the Keble, besides its own independent importance, has an interest of a temporary kind which a publisher" would be very much alive to; but those two papers, in a critical point of view, and with reference to our general literature, have an enduring importance, which makes it desirable that they should be disinterred, and appear by themselves. Believe me, truly yours, and much obliged, J. D. COLERIDGE. P.S. Should you be preparing the two papers I speak of for publication, if you would let me know, I might be able to suggest something—and if I could, I gladly would.” In the Life of John Coleridge Patteson, Missionary-Bishop of the Melanesian Islands-who was an old Oxford friend of Shairp's, and whose death at the post of duty was so tragic-we find a letter, dated 8th March 1871, in reference to the Studies, which had been sent out to him, in which he says "I am delighted with Shairp's Essays. He has the very nature to make him capable of appreciating the best and most thoughtful writers, especially those who have a thoughtful spirit of piety in them. He gives me many a very happy quiet hour. I wish such a book had come in my way while I was young. I am sure that I have neglected poetry all my life for want of some guide to the appreciation and criticism of it, and that I am the worse for it." V The last letter the good bishop wrote was to Shairp. The next day, 20th September, he was killed by the Nukapu (Polynesian) Islanders "Southern Cross MISSION SCHOONER, "IN THE SANTA CRUZ GROUP, S. W. PACIFIC, "19th September. แ ". . . You won't remember my name, and it is not likely that you can know anything about me; but I must write you a line and thank you for writing your two books (for I have but two) Studies in Poetry and Philosophy, and Culture and Religion. The Moral Dynamic and the latter are indeed the very books I have longed to see; books that one can put with confidence and satisfaction into the hands of men, young and old, in these stirring and dangerous times. Then it did me good to be recalled to old scenes, and to dream of old faces. I was almost a freshman when you came up to keep your M.A. term; and as I knew some of the men you knew, you kindly, as I well remember, gave me the benefit of it. As John Coleridge's cousin, and the acquaintance of John Keate, Cumin, Palmer, and dear James Riddell, I came to know men whom otherwise I could not have known, and of these how many there are that I have thought of and cared for ever since! You must have thought of Riddell, dear James Riddell, when you wrote the words in page seventy-six of your book on Culture and Religion, 'We have known such.' Yes, there was indeed about him a beauty of character that is very, very rare. Sellar is in the North somewhere. I think I have seen Essays by him on Lucretius. Indeed, you are doing a good work, and I pray God it may be abundantly blessed.-I remain, my dear friend, very sincerely yours, J. C. PATTESON." 1 1 Life of John Coleridge Patteson, vol. ii. pp. 336, 377, 378. CHAPTER XIII THE PRINCIPALSHIP OF THE UNITED COLLEGE of Latin, but to He had been an ON the death of Principal Forbes, John Campbell Shairp was elected by the Crown to the Principalship of the United College at St. Andrews. He was urgently requested, however, by a majority of the Professors of the United College, not to resign the Chair continue to hold both offices for a time.1 excellent Professor, and there were some doubts as to the consequence of his resignation of the Chair, which was not by statute obligatory. It is unnecessary to refer to any incident connected with this matter, or to the steps taken by others in regard to it, which should be now entirely forgotten, and which the Principal was the first to forget. It ought, however, to be said that Principal Shairp actedthroughout a somewhat painful and lengthened case-with an exclusive eye to the good and the honour of the College over which he presided. Many things came under my own notice after I became one of his colleagues in the University (and others have been told me by senior colleagues, and by our excellent and ever faithful janitor, Mr. Hodge), of Principal Shairp's special interest in the students that came to St. Andrews. It is one of the advantages which a small University has over a large one, that the students come into much closer personal relations to the teaching staff; and, when he ceased to teach, Shairp did not cease to care for, or to interest himself in the students. He had a special regard for Highlanders, and 1 See Professor Campbell's remarks on this at pp. 381, 382. sympathy with them; but it was his aim to get to know and to help all whom he could benefit in any way. Of course it was impossible to know all of the 150 to 200 students who spent the winter in St. Andrews equally well, or even to see them all at his house or elsewhere. Over and over again, however, Principal Shairp asked me to give him a list, not of the cleverest or most promising students, but of those who would be most encouraged by being asked to his house, and who would be most helped by means of it. It was those who were least likely to be asked elsewhere, whom he desired especially to befriend. In after years it fell to Principal Shairp to write the larger part of the Life of his predecessor, Principal Forbes; and as the preparation of that Memoir led him to speak at some length of St. Andrews itself, and of incidents and events in which he had himself to take a prominent part, a portion of one of its later chapters, descriptive of the University and its work,—and of the College Hall, which Principal Forbes was the chief instrument in founding,-may be given here. The personal part of this Memoir of Forbes will be referred to at a later stage: "The University over whose oldest and largest College Principal Forbes was now called to preside, is one of the few fragments which survived the wreck of the Scottish mediæval Church. Whatever the shortcomings and corruptions of that Church for two centuries before the Reformation may have been, it ought not to be forgotten that it is to her that we are indebted for our Universities. Three out of the four Universities of Scotland had Catholic Bishops for their founders. This was pre-eminently true of St. Andrews, the most ancient of them all. A Bishop it was-Henry Wardlaw-who, near the opening of the fifteenth century, founded that University, and the accomplished First James smiled upon its infancy. Each of the three Colleges which were successively incorporated into it owed their origin to a separate prelate. The oldest of the three Colleges, that of St. Salvator, was founded and endowed by the successor of Wardlaw, Bishop James Kennedy, kinsman of the king, and the wisest man of his time both in Church and State; a prelate of such pure and beneficent character that even George Buchanan, prelate-hater though he was, has no word but praise to speak of him. To him, in the old sea-tower at St. Andrews, his cousin, the Second James, turned for counsel when the violence of the three banded earls, each almost a king, had all but driven him from his throne. The next College in order of time was that of St. Leonard, founded by the youthful Archbishop of St. Andrews, Alexander Stewart, and by John Hepburn, prior of the monastery. One of the charters of the foundation was signed by the young archbishop, and confirmed by his father James IV.-the year before they two, father and son, fell together on the field of Flodden. The foundation of St. Salvator's College by Bishop Kennedy was one of the many efforts made by that prelate to counterwork the corruptions of his Church, and to reform those abuses which he saw were eating out its life. . This last College was scarcely founded when it became the nursing mother of many of those ardent spirits who bore a chief part in working that Church's overthrow. To have drunk of St. Leonard's Well was another expression for having adopted the principles of the Reformation. When the Reformation had got itself established, George Buchanan became Principal of St. Leonard's, which he adorned by his scholarship more than by his character. He received one pension from Queen Mary, and a second from Queen Elizabeth for slandering his first benefactress; so that, as has been said, though he did not serve two queens, he at least took wages from two. With the Reformation these two Colleges, which had been founded mainly for the rearing of clergy and the teaching of theology, were so far secularised that they were devoted exclusively to instructing students in classical literature, science, and philosophy. Instruction in theology was handed over by the Reformers exclusively to the younger College of St. Mary's, which, having been founded and endowed chiefly for this purpose by the last three Roman Catholic Archbishops, James Beatoun, David Beatoun, and John Hamilton, was soon after the Reformation presided over by those two stout antiprelatists, Andrew Melville and Samuel Rutherford. The two older Colleges, restricted to the more peaceful pursuits of classics, mathematics, and philosophy, were less heard of in the turbulent conflicts of the seventeenth century than their younger theological sister. About the middle of the eighteenth century the finances of St. Salvator and the tenements of St. Leonard's having fallen equally into disrepair, the more flourishing finances of the one were transferred to the better buildings of the other, and the two Colleges were by Act of Parliament conjoined, under the prosaic name of the United College. From that time, 1747, there have continued to be two instead of three Colleges in the University; and at this time St. Andrews remains the only place in Scotland where native Scots have an opportunity of learning the distinction between a College and a University. . . . These historic details are not out of place in the account of the life of Forbes. For him the ancient records, monuments, and tradi |