"A MAN remarkable in body and in mind, of a stature above the ordinary; his head large and his deportment royal; unwearied in study, and passing fourteen hours a day (as he told me) in reading; distinguished for acuteness but still more for memory, so that he said at times he knew not what it was to forget. Rugged in manner he was, but open, and unskilled in dissimulation, so that whether he loved man or hated him 'twas equally plain most lively in conversation, ever ready to serve a friend, but a good hater." The gentle reader will at once conjecture this to be an appreciation of the sage of Fleet Street by some unknown Boswell and the gentle reader will be wrong. It is indeed a portrait of a "Great Cham of Literature," and drawn by a chatty little Boswell of his day; but this Cham was one who derived his origin from a land which his great successor was wont to treat with elephantine pleasantry. For this is Thomas Dempster, Scot and universal scholar, of the time of James the Sixth and First. A strange figure, indeed, he presents to us, marvellously like that of the lexicographer, rolling his huge bulk aggressively about the world's stage, cheerful and dictatorial. But Dempster's Fleet Street was the whole learned continent of Europe, and his instruments of warfare were not folio Bibles wherewith to floor impertinent booksellers,

but weapons more lethal. Not a day did he allow to pass, says his biographer with proper pride, without an affray, either with swords or, if no swords were handy, then fists. And so it was that as Johnson was the terror of overweening publishers, so Dempster became "formidable to all pedagogues."

Twenty-fourth in a family of twenty-nine children, and one of triplets at that, so does Thomas announce himself to the world. In that age of horoscopes and "houses of the planets it was a common thing for the aspirant to fame to endeavour to prove himself something of a "wonder-child" as a first step to reputation; and we may suspect something of the kind here. The actual number of children is perhaps striking, but after all nothing in comparison with the seventy of a maternal kinsman of Dempster's own. No, where he makes his mistake is in assuring us that on the death of his eldest brother he became the heir.

Where were the twentytwo intermediates? Had they all complaisantly predeceased the eldest? The fact is, that little reliance can be placed upon this part of his story : what he wants to do is to prove that he was a professor at Paris before he was seventeen, and he probably postdates his birth some years in order to do this. He makes somewhat of a call upon our credulity. There was, indeed,

ever, he paraded on every titlepage of his books-baron of Muiresk-and a claim which he prosecuted fitfully for many years, being, as he says, much handicapped by his steadfast adhesion to Romanism: but whether he was born in that faith or adopted it later in life he nowhere vouchsafes to tell us. As to the parricidal brother, his career was lurid. He turned pirate, burned the Bishop of Orkney out of house and home, and after repudiating his "impure Medea" of a wife, betook himself to the lowlands of Holland, the refuge at that time of such wastrels, entered some army or other, and for having assaulted his colonel was torn in pieces by wild horses. The cup of poetic justice is filled up by the fate of Medea, for whom an entirely new disease was devised, of which she died in torment, seven children and all.

From these family jars Thomas was fortunately removed. Feuds with Currers and the Grants had long before rendered the paternal roof no safe shelter for a child, and at the age of three he was sent to rusticate with relatives in the country. There he says he learned all the elements (apparently the alphabet) in a single hour, and was then sent to school at Turriff, where for a while he groaned under the lash of a furious martinet named Ogston, no doubt a forbear of the suffragette "Lady with the whip," and then received some real instruction from & well-known schoolmaster, Thomas Cargill of Aberdeen. Still maintaining

his reputation as a "wonderchild," he proceeded to Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, at the age of ten. In comparison with this, Wolsey's graduation at fifteen seems a poor thing. But at Cambridge Dempster made no long stay: it is possible that the conversion of the child was one of the trophies of the Romanist propaganda there: at all events, from henceforth he appears as a zealous adherent of the Roman Church, and to study under that Church's auspices he now betook himself, with a tutor, to France. Landing at Calais, he fell among thieves, lost his tutor by death, and all his possessions at the hands of marauding French soldiers. Thus stripped and destitute, he made his way to Montreux, where he was succoured by Walter Bruce, a Scot in the French service, and forwarded on to Paris, where other kindly compatriots helped him to begin his studies. Almost immediately he fell a victim to one of the maladies which were endemic in the squalid colleges of the University, and though his powerful physique enabled him to throw off the disease, he very sensibly changed his quarters, and made his way through lands impartially devastated by French and Spanish troops to Louvain, where the great Justus Lipsius was illuminating the University.

If Dempster heard him, it was not for long: he was presently selected by William Crichton, Principal of the Scots College, as one of four promising youths who were to be sent to Rome to study under

uncomfortable as a place of residence, and on he went again, this time to Spain: he must have been close upon twenty by now.

Spain traversed, he undertook the tutorship of a youthful abbot, Arthur d'Espinay, afterwards Bishop of Marseilles, and with him he succeeded well, but 88 usual terminated his employment with an altercation with a relative of his pupil at Breisach. He had now quarrelled in nearly every country of Western Europe, and it occurred to him that he had still a very pretty little wrangle awaiting him in Scotland whenever he chose to take it up. Thither he repaired, but could effect little by way of recovery of his estates on account of his religious opinions, so he says. Yet, should he leave the land without breaking a lance with some one? William Cowper, a base man and a turncoat to Episcopacy, was his victim. For three days he belaboured the runagate with arguments at Perth till the latter was hissed by his own crew of sectaries, and would have had to flee the country (had he been betting on the result and could not pay, we wonder) had he not been protected by stout heretic lords, his kinsmen. But even so, he was shamed through all his nature to have been beaten in theological controversy by a mere jurist, and when he published an account of the controversy (what did he do that for if he was beaten?) basely concealed the name of his adversary, like "the vile slave of Calvin, the very mouth

piece of Satan, and incarnation of impurity" that he was.

To all this there is an obverse side, which makes us regret that we have not poor Jacob Grasser's account of that little affair at Nismes. Cowper, about whom Thomas's remarks are not altogether undeserved, did publish an account of an (imaginary) argument between himself and a Romanist champion, but it is a seven days' contest, and of course the Papist is pulverised. What truth underlies Thomas Dempster's statement it is difficult to say. Whether in invective or invention he was always thorough. But Scotland could yield him no further laurels, and he returned to Paris, where he acted as regent in four colleges successively those of Lisieux, Des Grassins, Du Plessis, and Beauvais,-which may mean that he was a very successful teacher, or quite the reverse.

At the college of Beauvais he created for himself the most picturesque situation in which he ever appears. During the absence of the principal he was left in charge as vicegerent, and there he had an opportu nity which he was not likely to miss. In spite of the diet of herring and onions imposed on the students, in some colleges at least, where, to quote the most recent chronicler of that sordid academic life, "Delicacy spelt death," the lads had some spirit left in them. They would have been no Frenchmen if they could not at times fight a duel or two. One of the alumni of Beauvais challenged a companion to fight, and Dempster