John Burnet of Barns by John Buchan — Read

The life at the college of Leyden was the most curious that one could well conceive; yet ere I had been there a week, I had begun heartily to like it. The students were drawn from the four corners of Europe: Swedes, great men with shaggy beards and invincible courage; neat-coated Germans, Dutchmen by the score, and not a few Frenchmen, who were the dandies of the place. We all gathered of a morning in the dusky lecture-hall, where hung the portraits of the great scholars of the past, and where in the cobwebbed rafters there abode such a weight of dust that a breeze coming through the high windows would stir it and make the place all but dark. Nor had I fault to find with the worthy professors, for I found soon that Master Sandvoort, though a miserly churl, had vast store of Latin, and would expound the works of Cornelius Tacitus in a fashion which I could not sufficiently admire. His colleague, too, who was the best of good fellows in the seclusion of his house, in his lecture-room was dignified and severe in deportment. You never saw such a change in a man. I went on the first morning expecting to find little but buffoonery; and lo! to my surprise, in walks my gentleman in a stately gown, holding his head like an archduke's; and when he began to speak, it was with the gravest accents of precision. And I roundly affirm that no man ever made more good matter come out of Plato. He would show wherein he erred and wherein he was wiser than those who sought to refute him; he would weigh with the nicest judgment the _variae lectiones_ on each passage; and he would illustrate all things with the choicest citations. In truth, I got a great wealth of good scholarship and sound philosophy from my squire of bottle and pasty.

I was not the only Scot in Leyden, as I soon discovered; for forbye that I had letters to Master Peter Wishart, who taught philosophy in the college, there abode in the town Sir James Dalrymple, afterwards my Lord Stair, the great lawyer, and sometime a professor in my old college, whose nephew I had so cruelly beaten before I bade farewell to Glasgow. He was a man of a grave deportment, somewhat bent with study, and with the look of exceeding weight on his face which comes to one who has shared the counsel of princes. There were also not a few Scots lords of lesser fame and lesser fortune, pensioners, many of them, on a foreign king, exiles from home for good and evil causes. As one went down the Breedestraat of a morning he could hear much broad Scots spoke on the causeway, and find many fellow-countrymen in a state ill-befitting their rank. For poverty was ever the curse of our nation, and I found it bitter to see ignoble Flemings and Dutch burghers flaunting in their finery, while our poor gentlemen were threadbare. And these folk, too, were the noblest in the land, bearing the proudest names, descendants of warriors and statesmen -- Halketts of Pitfirran, Prestons of Gorton, Stewarts, Hays, Sinclairs, Douglases, Hamiltons, and Grahams. It was their fathers and grandfathers who had won the day at Rijnemants, under Sir Robert Stuart, when, says Strada, "Nudi pugnant Scoti multi. " They had fought to the death on the Kowenstyn dyke when Parma beleaguered Antwerp.