70 Et memori semper solvendas pectore grates, etc. Quorum recitatione ne quam par est prolixior siem supersedeo. Quid ipsius humanitatem et pάorŋra, in qua obeunda omnibus sui ordinis mortalibus multis parasangis antecelluit, efferam? Delia notior non canibus ipsis, quam ipsius erga omnes quibuscum consuevit humanitas, in qua celebranda multus non ero, sed quod olim Athanasio 75 Nazianzenus tribuit encomium, idem et huic nostro deberi profitemur, ὑψηλὸς μὲν τοῖς ἔργοις, ταπεινὸς δὲ φρονήματι, tam animo mitis, inquit, et demissus quam vita sublimis. Accessu, affatu facilis iste, tanta erga inferiores comitate, in amicos aut dignitate aliqua praeditos reverentia, ut omnibus quos acciverat fama nominis, nihil amorem magis una et 80 admirationem ingeneraverit. 1 Allusion to Virg. Ecl. iii. 67. WILLIAM CARGILL. The author of this piece is William Cargill, Bajan of Marischal College in 1616, and M.A. on July 27, 1619 (Fasti Acad. Mar. ii. 195). He was Cargill bursar, 'as brother's son to the late Mr. James' (i. 149), and burgess in 1622. He appears in 1626-27 among the entries of the Burgh Accounts (Spald. Club Miscell. v. 102): "Item, to Mr. Wm. Cargill, for sum poesie dedicat be him to the Counsall, 10 lib." See Musa, vol. i. p. ix. n. The book from which the lines are taken is entitled: 66 Raine from the Cloudes upon a Choicke Angel, or a returned Answer to that Common Quaeritur of our Adversaries, where was your Church before Luther. Aberdene. Imprinted by Edward Raban 1624." The author was Andrew Logie, M.A., of Marischal College (Fasti Acad. Mar. ii. 187), Parson of Rayne, and Archdeacon of Aberdeen. Baillie George Walker (Aberdeen Herald, Nov. 20, 1858) notes that copies in Archbishop Marsh's Library, Dublin, and in the Bodleian, have the date altered in an ancient hand to 1634. The piece," says Joseph Robertson (Book of Bon-Accord, p. 119), "is distinguished by great learning and ingenuity, and exhibits much skill in polemical science; the style is expressive though singularly quaint and affected. Logie lived to witness the Restoration, when he published "A Remonstrance to the Godly Party, containing a Vindication of Episcopacy, and of the nicknamed unlawful Engagement." 1661. 8vo. His son, Captain John Logie, was beheaded with Sir John Gordon of Haddo, at the Cross of Edinburgh, July 19, 1644. For the answer of Bishop Patrick Forbes to the same question of the church before Luther,' and the Catholic literature at the time upon it, see Shand's Funerals, pp. cvi., cx. ་ IN PRAISE OF ANDREW LOGIE. ARGUMENT. Often did Logie fighting on a foreign shore with the mighty arms of reason put down the arms and the very chiefs of Rome; victor also at home he exults, and tramples on the foe by reason, his sagacity, and the holy word, which the father himself of Olympus provided. The Archangel himself shall fall by this weapon; the hosts of Rome and the Pope he will crush with this penetrating sword, and bring ruin on all false dogmas. He will loose all the knots that even the land of Italy has opposed in times past to the true preachers of the word. IN LAVDEM AVTHORIS. Saepius externis pugnans LOGIAEVS in oris Ingenio, verboque sacro, flammantis Olympi TO THE AUTHOR. Braue LOGIE; so continue to beate downe, And show, that much of Vntrueths is but patched, Which they maintaine, So Trueth shall Thee vp-holde, And make thy foes to quaile, but Thee more bolde. THOMAS DEMPSTER. The life of Thomas Dempster, the first and greatest of all the wandering scholars produced by the University of Aberdeen, has been written by himself. It reads like a romance, and perhaps it is largely coloured by that quality. One scarcely knows what to make of a man who, in the second line of his autobiography, gravely assures his readers that he was the twenty-fourth child out of twenty-nine borne by the same mother to the same father. In the title pages of his works Dempster styles himself' Baro de Muresk,' though he has not explained the extraordinary mortality among his predecessors in the family circle by which he became possessed of that barren title. There have been men who have, under the influence of family pride, laboured under the idea that the history of the Gordons, the Forbeses, the Douglases, constituted the history of Scotland. Dempster suffered from the lues Dempsteriana. His genealogy (i. 235) of Dempsters and Deemsters in the Isle of Man, his infantile precocity in learning the alphabet in one hour in his third year, and much of what he has related about himself, should not be taken too seriously. His enemies called him a liar. We have changed all that,' and megalomania, obsession of one idea, and other phrases are now used to explain the phenomenon he presents. Thomas Dempster, born at Cliftbog, Aberdeenshire, August 23, 1579, was the son of Thomas Dempster of Muiresk and Auchterless, and of his wife Jane Leslie, sister of Leslie of Balquhain. He was educated at Turriff, sub ferulâ plagosi Andreae Ogstoni, who was, when he himself wrote his Historia Ecclesiastica, still living in the Orkneys (ii. 514). He proceeded to the Grammar School of Aberdeen under the rector, Thomas Cargill (q. v.), and he mentions among his schoolfellows David Wedderburn (ii. 671), Thomas Reid (ii. 576), and James Robertson (ii. 577) of Toulouse. The extraordinary story, which he calmly relates with a total disregard of the national reticence, of his eldest brother James marrying the concubine of his father, the subsequent career of the intending parricide, who burned the palace of the Bishop of Orkney, and was torn in pieces by horses at Utrecht for true Dempsterian insubordination, should be read in the original. He says he entered Pembroke College, Cambridge, in his tenth year. Thence he betook himself to France. His wanderings now began, and a wanderer he was destined to remain to the close. The number of Scots abroad in the Catholic and Protestant places of learning at the time was great; and Dempster, like the sailor in Dibdin, appears to have found a friend and a countryman in the chairs of the leading Continental universities. Paris, Louvain, Rome, Toulouse, Tournay were all in turns visited by him, and at the last place he took the degree of M.A. He was invited to Montpellier by Dr. Adam Abernethy (M.A. Edin., 1594), and for a time occupied a chair at Nismes. He paid a flying visit to Scotland with the vague and vain hope of recovering some of the family heritage, but on his failure to do so he retired to Paris. Some years later James VI. invited him to England under a promise of making him historiographer-royal, and he there married Susanna Valeria, or Susanna Waller, the apparent cause of all his subsequent misfortunes. He blames Montague, Bishop of Bath and Wells, for blasting his prospects at court. At Pisa Dempster, who was Doctor Utriusque Juris, and a learned civilian, was elected to teach the Pandects. In 1619 he was appointed to the Chair of Humanity at Bologna, a post held, as he proudly notes, by such men as Paulus Manutius, Carolus Sigonius, and Francis Robortellus (Hallam, Liter. ch. x. §§ 19, 35, 54-57). Here,inter assiduas foris lectiones, domi solicitudines,' his wandering and shattered bark (lacera carina ') appeared at rest. But he longed for a return to his native land, nor are his words without a pathetic ring. "Ita asperrimam fortunam et durum exilium Deus lenire velit. Utinam, utinam!" His wife eloped, and he pursued the fugitives to Vicenza. But it was at the hottest season of the year ('sub aestuante Caniculâ ') during the raging of the dog-star. The heat and the anxiety proved too much for the over-taxed Baron of Muiresk. Seized with a fever, he was carried back to Bologna, where he died, Sept. 6, 1625, in the forty-sixth year of his age. He had been knighted by Pope Urban VIII., in whom he found a friend, and had become a member of one of the academies, or societies, of the time, that of the Academia della Notte. His associates lamented him in sonnets and a florid Latin epitaph, written in the decaying style of the age (Pattison's Milton, p. 35), when the Italian wits lamented "that nothing had been written there now these many years but flattery and fustian." Dempster has long been regarded as the standing example of Sir Henry Wotton's ambassador, "sent abroad to lie for the good of his country". His patriotism is enormous, and, next to himself, the idea of Scotland and its antiquity seems to have been his besetting weakness. What has been remembered against him is the detailed knowledge which he shows, in his Historia Ecclesiastica, of the works of Queen Boadicea or Bundevica (i. 108), and King Fergus (i. 291). It may, however, be conceded that his work is of great value when used with discretion. He was brought during his wanderings into contact with many men like himself, whose writings he had read, seen, or heard about, the work of rare foreign printing presses and now irrecoverably lost. His hurried life left him no time for detailed research, and he wrote at a distance with no aid from bibliographical specialists. After all deductions that may be made about uncritical and undigested scholarship, the erudition of Dempster, exhibited in a short and wandering life, remains enormous. In his class he is what Marlowe is in the Elizabethan drama, the standard type. The portrait of this great pupil of the Grammar School of Aberdeen has been drawn by his friend, Matthaeus Peregrinus, and it should be read entire in the original. It preserves the clear features of the man. 66 Dempsterus fuit vir corpore et animo egregius; altitudo illi supra mediocrem vulgaris hominis magnitudinem; coma subnigrior, et cuti color non longe dispar; caput magnum, ac totius corporis habitus plane regius; robur et ferocitas, quibus vel praestantissimum militem praestare posset, reque ipsa saepius se talem exhibuit. Indefessus in legendo, ita ut quatuordecim diei horas librorum lectionem se continuare solitum mihi saepe retulerit. Mentis acumine satis valuit, sed memoriae tenacitate longe plurimum, adeo ut multoties diceret ignorare se, quid sit oblivio. Nihil adeo abditum in antiquitatis monumentis cuius non meminerit. Stylus quidem ei copiosus, confragosus tamen; moribus ferox fuit, apertus omnino, et simulandi nescius . . . consuetudine iucundissimus, amicis obsequentissimus, ita inimicis maxime infensus, acceptaeque iniuriae tenax, eam aperte agnoscens et repetens, caeteroquin pius, religiosus, et in iis locis, in quibus mira pietatis Christianae visuntur exempla, non infrequens." His language on the Gunpowder Plot is quite up to the Jacobean expectation, and his detestation of the massacre of St. Bartholomew was too strong for the editors of his posthumous History. ... |