With respect to his private life, we are told by Thomasius that he had by his English wife one son, whose name was Caspar, and who died while still a youth, and had a monument erected by his father to his memory, bearing the simple inscription, "Caspari. Filiolo. Alexander. Alesius. Doctor. Lugens. Posuit." He had at least two daughters. One named Christina, Thomasius tells us, was married to a German bearing the classical name Marcus Scipio: she outlived her husband, and died in 1604, in the fifty-ninth year of her age. The name of the other daughter does not seem to have been known to Thomasius, but as he states that she was given in marriage in 1557, we can have no doubt that she is the same Anna whose wedding is referred to in a letter of Alesius to Melanchthon, recently unearthed, and inviting him and other friends in Wittenberg to the wedding.[318]
His Death.
Alesius himself died on the 17th March 1565, and was buried at Leipsic; but no stone was raised, or, if raised, now remains, to tell where his ashes repose. In all probability it was in his son's grave, in the church of St Paul, in the city of Leipsic, that his ashes were laid to rest. The only monuments to his memory reared at the time and still existing are those furnished by our own John Johnston—second master of St Mary's College, and colleague of Andrew Melville—in his Latin poems on the Scottish martyrs and confessors, and entitled Περι Στεφανων and by Beza in his 'Icones.' Johnston, joining together Macchabaeus and Alesius, says:—
"Sors eadem exilii nobis, vitaeque laborumque,
Ex quo nos Christi conciliavit amor.
Una salus amborum, unum et commune periclum;
Pertulimus pariter praestite cuncta Deo.
Dania te coluit. Me Lipsia culta docentem.
Audiit, et sacros hausit ab ore sonus."[319]
Beza says, "He was a man dear to all the learned, who would have been a distinguished ornament of Scotland if that country had recovered the light of the Gospel at an earlier period; and who, when rejected by both Scotland and England, was most eagerly embraced by the evangelical church of Saxony, and continued to be warmly cherished and esteemed by her to the day of his death." The man who was held in such high esteem by the reforming Archbishops of Cologne and Canterbury; who was the bosom friend of Melanchthon; who was highly thought of by Luther, and warmly eulogised by Beza and Johnston, was certainly not one whose memory his countrymen should willingly let die. He was unquestionably the most cultured, probably also the most liberal and conciliatory, of the Scottish theologians of the sixteenth century. He was the first to plead publicly before the authorities of the nation for the right of every household and every individual to have access to the Word of God in the vernacular tongue, and to impress on parents the sacred duty of sedulously inculcating its teaching on their children, and therefore, as Christopher Anderson has said, "the man who struck the first note in giving a tone to that character," for which his native country has since been known, and often since commended, as Bible-loving Scotland. Had hisDeserves a Memorial. countrymen not so long lost sight of him, perhaps some stone of remembrance might have been found to his memory in Germany; but surely, though he was so long an exile, the chief memorial of his birth and death ought to be in Edinburgh or St Andrews. "There, in reference to the cause he advocated, no inappropriate emblem" would be "a father and his child reading the same sacred volume; and, for a motto, in remembrance of his position at the moment, perhaps his own memorable quotation of the Athenian, 'Strike, but hear me.'"[320]
APPENDIX A (p. [19]).
THE PÆDAGOGIUM, OR ST MARY'S COLLEGE, ST ANDREWS.[321]
St Mary's College, if in one sense the youngest, is in another sense the oldest, college within the University. It occupies the earliest site of the University, and gathers up into itself not only the old Pædagogium, but also a still older college. In January 1418 ... a certain Robertus de Monte Rosarum mortified a site on the south side of South Street, with the buildings thereon, as a college for the study of theology and arts. This was the strip of ground on which the eastern portion of the Library, as well as the new south wing, now stands, but on which, in the oldest bird's-eye view of the city, a sort of collegiate building is represented as standing. That was undoubtedly the College, or Hall, or "Inns" of St John, to which repeated reference is made in the oldest manuscript records of the University. It had probably a lecture-room, rooms for the students to lodge in, and a chapel also, dedicated to St John the Evangelist, in which daily service was maintained, but, so far as we now know, it was very poorly endowed.
In 1430 Bishop Wardlaw, the illustrious founder of the University, mortified as a site for a Pædagogium or common school for the faculty of arts the strip of land and buildings thereon immediately to the west of St John's College—the frontage now covered by the western portion of the Library, the porch of St Mary's College, and the Principal's house. After the erection and endowment of St Salvator's College by Bishop Kennedy, and of St Leonard's College by Prior Hepburn, the attendance on the Pædagogium, which was but slenderly endowed, seems to have fallen off, and the number of its regents to have been curtailed. Archbishop Alexander Stewart, the favourite pupil of Erasmus, and one of the most accomplished of our long line of chancellors, was the first who formed the purpose of enlarging and endowing Bishop Wardlaw's foundation, but his life was prematurely brought to a close on the fatal field of Flodden. His successor, Andrew Forman, appears to have taken no interest in the work on which Stewart had set his heart. But James Betoun, who came next in succession, acted a nobler part. He brought with him from Glasgow John Major—the one great schoolman of whom Scotland in the sixteenth century could boast, who had upheld the reputation of his country in the University of Paris as an able and successful teacher of the philosophy and theology of the day. Major and Patrick Hamilton—the one the representative of the old, the other of the new learning—were incorporated into the University of St Andrews on the same day (9th June 1523); and, for at least two years, the former presided over the Pædagogium, and probably lectured both on philosophy and theology. In 1525-26 he returned to Paris, partly that he might publish there his commentaries on the Gospels, and partly that he might act again as a teacher in that wider sphere; but a few years later, on a vacancy occurring in the principality of St Salvator's College, he returned to St Andrews, and continued in that more lucrative charge till his death.