“Dr James Sibbald, Minister of St Nicholas, and a Regent in the University, is recorded by the same contemporary: ‘It will not be affirmed by his very enemyes, but that Dr James Sibbald was ane eloquent and painefull preacher, a man godly, and grave, and modest, not tainted with any vice unbeseeming a minister, to whom nothing could in reason be objected, if you call not his ante-covenanting a cryme.’[[15]] Principal Baillie, while condemning his Arminian doctrines, says—‘The man was, there, of great fame.’
“Dr Alexander Scroggy, minister in the Cathedral Church, first known to the world as thought worthy to contribute to the ‘Funerals’ of his patron and friend, Bishop Forbes,[[16]] is described in 1640 by Gordon as ‘a man sober, grave, and painefull in his calling;’[[17]] and by Baillie as ‘ane old man, not verie corrupt, yet perverse in the Covenant and Service-book.’ His obstinacy yielded under the weight of old age and the need of rest, but he is not the more respected for the questionable recantation of all his early opinions.[[18]]
“Foremost, by common consent, among that body of divines and scholars, was John Forbes, the good bishop’s son. He had studied at King’s College, and, after completing his education in the approved manner by a round of foreign universities, returned to Scotland to take his doctor’s degree, and to be the first professor in the chair of theology, founded and endowed in our University by his father and the clergy of the diocese. Dr John Forbes’s theological works have been appreciated by all critics and students, and have gone some way to remove the reproach of want of learning from the divines of Scotland. His greatest undertaking, the Instructiones historico-theologicæ, which he left unfinished, Bishop Burnett pronounces to be ‘a work which, if he had finished it, and had been suffered to enjoy the privacies of his retirement and study to give us the second volume, had been the greatest treasure of theological learning that perhaps the world has yet received.[[19]]
“These were the men whom the bishop drew into the centre and heart of the sphere which he had set himself to illuminate; and in a short space of time, by their united endeavours, there grew up around their Cathedral and University a society more learned and accomplished than Scotland had hitherto known, which spread a taste for literature and art beyond the academic circle, and gave a tone of refinement to the great commercial city and its neighbourhood.
“It must be confessed cultivation was not without bias. It would seem that, in proportion as the Presbyterian and Puritan party receded from the learning of some of their first teachers, literature became here, as afterwards in England, the peculiar badge of Episcopacy. With Episcopacy went, hand in hand, the high assertion of royal authority; and influenced as it had been by Bishop Patrick Forbes and his followers, Aberdeen became, and continued for a century to be, not only a centre of northern academic learning, but a little stronghold of loyalty and Episcopacy—the marked seat of high Cavalier politics and anti-Puritan sentiments of religion and church government.
“That there was a dash of pedantry in the learning of that Augustan age of our University, was the misfortune of the age, rather than peculiar to Aberdeen. The literature of Britain and all Europe, except Italy, was still for the most part scholastic, and still to a great degree shrouded in the scholastic dress of a dead language; and we must not wonder that the northern University exacted from her divines and philosophers, even from her historians and poets, that they should use the language of the learned. After all, we owe too much to classical learning to grudge that it should for a time have overshadowed and kept down its legitimate offspring of native literature. ‘We never ought to forget,’ writes one worthy to record the life and learning of Andrew Melville, ‘that the refinement and the science, secular and sacred, with which modern Europe is enriched, must be traced to the revival of ancient literature, and that the hid treasures could not have been laid open and rendered available but for that enthusiasm with which the languages of Greece and Rome were cultivated in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.’[[20]]
“It is not to be questioned that in the literature of that age, and in all departments of it, Aberdeen stood pre-eminent. Clarendon commemorates the ‘many excellent scholars and very learned men under whom the Scotch universities, and especially Aberdeen, flourished.’[[21]] ‘Bishop Patrick Forbes,’ says Burnet, ‘took such care of the two colleges in his diocese, that they became quickly distinguished from all the rest of Scotland.... They were an honour to the Church, both by their lives and by their learning; and with that excellent temper they seasoned that whole diocese, both clergy and laity, that it continues to this very day very much distinguished from all the rest of Scotland, both for learning, loyalty, and peaceableness.’[[22]]
“That this was no unfounded boast, as regards one department of learning, has been already shown, in enumerating the learned divines who drew upon Aberdeen the general attention soon after the death of their bishop and master. In secular learning it was no less distinguished. No one excelled Robert Gordon of Straloch in all the accomplishments that honour the country gentleman. Without the common desire of fame or any more sordid motive, he devoted his life and talents to illustrate the history and literature of his country. He was the prime assistant to Scotstarvet in his two great undertakings, the Atlas and the collections of Scotch poetry.[[23]] The maps of Scotland in the Great Atlas (many of them drawn by himself, and the whole ‘revised’ by him at the earnest entreaty of Charles I.), with the topographical descriptions that accompany them, are among the most valuable contributions ever made by an individual to the physical history of his country. His son, James Gordon, parson of Rothiemay, followed out his father’s great objects with admirable skill, and in two particulars he merits our gratitude even more. He was one of the earliest of our countrymen to study drawing, and to apply it to plans and views of places; and, while he could wield Latin easily, he condescended to write the history of his time in excellent Scotch.
“While these writers were illustrating the history of their country in prose, a crowd of scholars were writing poetry, or, at least, pouring forth innumerable copies of elegant Latin verses. While the two Johnstons were the most distinguished of those poets of Aberdeen, John Leech, once Rector of our University,[[24]] David Wedderburn, rector of the Grammar School, and many others, wrote and published pleasing Latin verse, which stands the test of criticism. While it cannot be said that such compositions produce on the reader the higher effects of real poetry, they are not without value, if we view them as tests of the cultivation of the society among which they were produced. Arthur Johnston not only addresses elegiacs to the bishop and his doctors, throwing a charming classical air over their abstruser learning, but puts up a petition to the magistrates of the city, or celebrates the charms of Mistress Abernethy, or the embroideries of the Lady Lauderdale—all in choice Latin verse, quite as if the persons whom he addressed appreciated the language of the poet.[[25]]
“Intelligent and educated strangers, both foreigners and the gentry of the north, were attracted to Aberdeen; and its colleges became the place of education for a higher class of students than had hitherto been accustomed to draw their philosophy from a native source.[[26]]