BUCK's HEAD, GLASGOW

NEXT morning I devoted to visiting the University here, and paying my respects to several of the Professors, to whom I had received letters of introduction from several of my friends in Edinburgh, as well as London. I found the buildings very respectable in appearance—and altogether much more academical in their style than those of Edinburgh. The reason of this is, that they are for the most part much more ancient—or rather, perhaps, that they resemble much more what my eyes had been accustomed to at Cambridge and Oxford.

The University consists, as in Edinburgh, of a single College, but it is a much more venerable and wealthy foundation, and the Professors, instead of occupying separate houses in different parts of the town, as in Edinburgh, are lodged altogether in a very handsome oblong court, (like the close of some of our cathedrals,) immediately beside the quadrangles used for public purposes. These quadrangles are two in number, and their general effect is much like that of some of our English third-rate colleges. The first one enters is a very narrow one, surrounded with black buildings of a most sombre aspect, and adorned on one side with a fine antique stair, which leads to their Faculty-Hall, or Senate-House. The second, to which you approach by a vaulted passage under a steeple, is much larger, but the effect of it is quite spoiled by a large new building in the Grecian style, which has been clumsily thrust into the midst of the low towers and curtains of the old monastic architecture. Both courts are paved all over with smooth flag-stones—for the Scottish academics are not of such orderly habits as to admit of their quadrangles being covered with fine bowling-greens as ours are. However, I was certainly much pleased with the appearance of the whole structure.

From the second court, another arched way leads into an open square behind, which is not built round, but which contains in separate edifices the University Library on one hand—and, on the other, the Hunterian Museum, which you know was left in the collector's will to this seminary, at which he had received the early part of his education.