he influence of
that uncompromising teacher to whom reform was everything, who had no
prepossession in favour of what was old and venerable, but desired with
all the fervour of his fiery soul to make everything new, has doubtless
waned, save to that sacred simplicity of ignorance which forms no
judgment. But nothing can obliterate the person and strenuous being of
John Knox, or make him a less interesting figure on the crowded and
tragic stage of that epoch which he dominated and chronicled. And
nothing can unlink the associations which make him ever present and
living in Edinburgh, which was the capital and centre of his kingdom as
much as of any king who ever breathed.

John Knox was in every sense of the words a son of the soil, yet came of
a not unknown family, "kent folk" of East Lothian: if not lairds of any
great heritage, yet possessing lands and living sufficient to entitle
them to consideration. They were able to give him the best education of
the time, which he completed at the University of Glasgow under the
teaching of Major or Mair, the same whom George Buchanan accompanied to
France; so that both these great men, as well as various nobles and
ecclesiastics of the time, were his fellow-students, trained under the
same influence. Whether Knox followed Major to St. Andrews as Buchanan
followed him to Paris is not known; but he would seem to have lectured
on philosophy in St. Andrews at the beginning of his career. It might be
that he was himself present, and heard some of the bold and familiar
addresses of the wandering friars, the first rude champions of Reform,
whose protest against the wickedness of the bishops and the extortions
of the clergy he quotes with so much enjoyment of their rough humour, in
the beginning of his history; or even might have witnessed the lighted
pile and felt across his face the breath of that "reek" which carried
spiritual contagion with it, as it flew upon the keen breeze from the
sea over that little centre of life, full of scholars and wits, and keen
cynical spectators little likely to be convinced by any such means. It
is curious to hear of Major for instance, one of the Sorbonne, a doctor
of Paris and man of the world, as present at all those proceedings,
listening to Friar William's denunciation of the priests, to which he
gave his assent as "a doctrine that might weill be defended, for it
contayned no heresye"--and in very different circumstances to the
sermons of Rough,