Some months after settling in Sedan, he received a letter from his nephew with all the home news, which was very gloomy. The bishops were now in their glory. 'If they get the Kingdom of Heaven,' so the Chancellor Seaton said of them, 'they must be happy men, for they already reign on earth.' The pulpits were silent: poor nephew James himself was still in exile, sick, with his heart pierced with many wounds, and longing that he had the wings of a dove that he might fly away and be at rest. To this letter Melville replied in a strain of exuberant cheerfulness:—
'Your letter, my dear James, gave me as much pleasure as it is possible for one to receive in these gloomy and evil days. We must not forget the apostolical injunction, "Rejoice always: rejoice in hope." Non si male nunc, et olim erit. Providence is often pleased to grant prosperity and long impunity to those whom it intends to punish for their crimes, in order that they may feel more severely from the reverse.... It is easy for a wicked man to throw a commonwealth into disorder: God only can restore it. Empires which have been procured by fraud cannot be stable or permanent. Pride and cruelty will meet with a severe, though it may be a late retribution; and, according to the Hebrew proverb, "When the tale of bricks is doubled, Moses comes." The result of past events is oracular of the future: "In the mount of the Lord it shall be seen." Why, then, exert our ingenuity and labour in adding to our vexation? Away with fearful apprehensions!'
Turning his thoughts to his old friends and neighbours, the exile makes playful inquiries for their welfare:—
'What is the profound Dreamer (so I was accustomed to call him when we travelled together in 1584)—what is our Corydon of Haddington about? I know he cannot be idle; has he not brought forth or perfected anything yet, after so many decades of years? Tempus Atla veniet tua quo spoliabitur arbos. Let me know if our old friend Wallace has at last become the father of books and bairns? Menalcas of Cupar on the Eden is, I hear, constant; and I hope he will prove vigilant in discharging all the duties of a pastor, and not mutable in his friendships, as too many discover themselves to be in these cloudy days. Salute him in my name; as also Damoetas of Elie, and our friend Dykes, with such others as you know to "hold the beginning of their confidence and the rejoicing of their hope firm to the end." ... We old men daily grow children again, and are ever and anon turning our eyes and thoughts back on our cradles. We praise the past days because we can take little pleasure in the present. Suffer me then to dote; for I am now become pleased with old age, although I have lived so long as to see some things which I could wish never to have seen. I try daily to learn something new, and thus to prevent my old age from becoming listless and inert. I am always doing, or at least attempting to do, something in those studies to which I devoted myself in the younger part of my life. Accept this long epistle from a talkative old man. Loqui senibus res est gratissima, says your favourite Palingenius, the very mention of whose name gives me new life; for the regeneration forms almost the sole topic of my meditations, and in this do I exercise myself that I may have my conversation in heaven.'
How keenly Melville felt the cruelty of the Government in driving himself and his nephew into exile appears in another part of the same letter:—
'What crime have you committed? What has the monarch now to dread? Does not the primate sit in triumph—traxitque sub astra furorem? What is there, then, to hinder you, and me also (now approaching my seventieth year, and consequently emeritus), from breathing our native air, and, as a reward of our toils, being received into the Prytaneum, to spend the remainder of our lives, without seeking to share the honours and affluence which we do not envy the pretended bishops? We have not been a dishonour to the kingdom, and we are allied to the royal family. [Melville claimed a consanguinity for his family with the Stuarts through their common extraction from John of Gaunt.] But let envy do its worst; no prison, no exile, shall prevent us from confidently expecting the kingdom of heaven.'
In the following year Melville was greatly cheered by hearing that all the exiled ministers had refused an offer which the Crown had made to allow them to return to their country on condition of their making a submission to Episcopacy; and he wrote expressing his admiration of their heroism, and assuring them of his continual remembrance: 'I keep all my friends in my eye; I carry them in my bosom; I commend them to the God of mercy in my daily prayers.... I do not sink under adversity; I reserve myself for better days.'
In April 1614 there fell on Melville the heaviest blow his affection ever received—the tidings of his nephew's death. James Melville died well-nigh broken-hearted; he had not been allowed to return to his own country and resume his charge of his poor seafaring folk, nor to join in France the exile who was so endeared to him. On his deathbed, and within a few hours of the end, when one who was beside him asked if he had no desire to recover, he replied, 'No, not for twenty worlds.' His friends asked him to give them some sign that he was at peace, when he repeated the dying words of the martyr Stephen, and so passed away to that country of his own which all his life he had been seeking.
There is no one in the long line of great Scottish Churchmen whose memory deserves more honour than James Melville, or inspires so much affection, so gracious was his spirit, so pure his character, so disinterested his aims. With the solitary exception which we need not name, there was no one in his own day who rendered better or more varied service to the Church and to the country. For many years he was his uncle's right-hand man as a teacher in our two chief Universities; the Church never had a pastor who had more of the true pastor's heart, nor a leader of more wisdom in counsel, more persuasiveness in conference, more decision in action; it never had a more vivid historian, nor one whose writings are so great a treasure of our Scottish literature. When James Melville came to his grave, how different the world would be to his great kinsman, who could so truly have said, 'Very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.' His uncle's grief found its only solace in the thought that he was 'now out of all doubt and fashrie, enjoying the fruits of his suffering here.'
Melville himself never lost his hopefulness and happy ardour. In 1612 he wrote to Robert Durie, one of the banished brethren:—