Glasgow in 1898 is even more changed from Glasgow in 1764 than Aberdeen when Reid lived in it from Aberdeen as it is now. To-day Glasgow is the second city in Britain, with nearly a million of people, the industrial metropolis of the north, with all the stir of industrial life. It was then a provincial town with hardly thirty thousand inhabitants, almost inaccessible from the sea, surrounded by the cornfields and hedgerows and orchards of Lanarkshire, its few streets converging on the Cathedral and the College with their historic associations. ‘Glasgow,’ according to _Humphrey Clinker_, ‘is the pride of Scotland. It is one of the prettiest towns in Europe.’ Pennant describes it as ‘the best built of any second-rate city I ever saw. The view from the Cross has an air of vast magnificence.’ In 1764 it was only laying the foundations of its present commercial fame. The tobacco trade with the American plantations, and the sugar trade with the West Indies, had hardly altered its character as an ancient Church and University town. ‘Jupiter Carlyle,’ referring to Glasgow before the middle of last century, speaks of ‘a few families of ancient citizens who pretended to be gentlemen; and a few others, recently settled, who had obtained wealth and consideration in trade. The rest were shopkeepers and mechanics, who occupied large warerooms to furnish cargoes to Virginia. It was then usual for the sons of merchants to attend the College for one or two years, and a few of them completed their academical education.’ The College in the High Street, erected early in the seventeenth century, seemed to Samuel Johnson in 1773 ‘without a sufficient share in the magnificence of the place.’ Nevertheless he found ‘learning an object of wide importance, and the habit of application much more general than in the neighbouring University of Edinburgh.’ The two College squares, connected with memories of many generations in the west of Scotland, have been likened to those of Lincoln College in Oxford. About the middle of last century from three to four hundred students gathered in those curious old courts, almost all living in apartments in the town, a few boarded in the houses of professors. They wore scarlet gowns, ‘most of which,’ when Wesley visited Glasgow, ‘were very dirty, some very ragged, and all of very coarse cloth.’ The houses of the professors formed a square on the north side of the College, built early in the eighteenth century. Eastward were the College gardens and the park, through which the classic Molendinar found its way to the Clyde. It was a quaint and curious old-world life that was then lived in the College, and in the High Street, passing from the College to the Cathedral at one end and from the College to the Cross at the other.