Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/210

 196 w. E. SCOTT: looked to Scotland as his home, regarding his position in Ireland rather as that of a colonist than as that of a native of the country. Hence it was only to be expected that he sent his son to Scotland to the University of Glasgow. It was therefore at Glasgow that James Arbuckle took his M.A. degree in 1720. 1 Arbuckle may have met Hutcheson at Glasgow, as he seems to have matriculated just before Hutcheson left to return to Ireland. He found himself at once plunged into a scene of turmoil and strife. At this period Stirling was Principal. He appears to have been a man of slight scholar- ship, and his influence was rather in the direction of the academic loaves and fishes, than the maintenance either of discipline or culture. To increase his own influence, he represented that, owing to the state of political feeling after the Rebellion, " it might occasion strife to call the students together to choose a Rector," and, therefore, he claimed the right of nominating three names, from which list the Rector was to be chosen by the Professors (or Regents as they were then), thereby depriving the students of one of their most cherished privileges. 2 This led to the outbreak of 1718, when some of the Professors took the students' side, and were even accused of exciting the students to riot. 3 Arbuckle seems to have been prominent in the dispute, and he came in collision with the Principal, through his writing Prologues for the students' performances of " Cato " and " Tamburlaine " performances avowedly designed as a protest against the Principal. If Stirling was not a scholar, Arbuckle found him a " good hater," and on several occasions his academic career appears to have been in danger of sudden curtailment. In the Students' Pamphlet already mentioned, it is alleged that Stirling went so far as to obtain an act of the Senatus " to suppress Immorality," which was really directed against 1 Munimenta Univ. Glasg. 2 A Short Account of the Late Treatment of the Students of the Univer- sity of Glasgow. Dublin, 1722, pp. 5, 6. The copy of this very rare pamphlet in the Glasgow University Library is endorsed, " said to have been written by Mr. Robertson, probably the same who was expelled in 1725, but the sentence taken off by visitation in 1727," and in another place "sometimes ascribed to James Arbuckle ". Some of the references to Arbuckle are not such as he would have been likely to have written himself, nor is the style like that of his prose works. It is very probable that the pamphlet was the work of several students, and that Arbuckle bore his part hi its composition. (An account of Eobertson's career at Glasgow will be found in the Christian Moderator, ii., p. 308.) 3 "Wodrow MSS. (Advocates' Library, Edinburgh), No. 41, Nos. 95-9.