'Am I not threescore and eight years old; unto the which age none of my fourteen brethren came? And yet, I thank God, I eat, I drink, I sleep, as well as I did these thirty years bygone, and better than when I was younger--_in ipso flore adolescentiae_. Only the gravel now and then seasons my mirth with some little pain, which I have felt only since the beginning of March the last year, a month before my deliverance from prison. I feel, thank God, no abatement of the alacrity and ardour of my mind for the propagation of the truth. Neither use I spectacles now more than ever, yea, I use none at all, nor ever did, and see now to read Hebrew without points, and in the smallest characters. Why may I not live to see a changement to the better, when the Prince shall be informed truly by honest men, or God open His eyes and move His heart to see the pride of stately prelates?' The last production from Melville's pen was a pamphlet against the Anglican ceremonies imposed by the King on the Church in _The Five Articles of Perth_ in 1618. We know little of the last years of his life. His health apparently gave way in 1620, and he died in Sedan in 1622, having reached his seventy-seventh year. The only fault Melville's enemies could find with his personal character was his impetuous and explosive temper. In regard to this, he was his own best apologist when he said, 'If my anger is from below, trample upon it; but if from above, let it rise!' If he was 'zealously affected,' it was always 'in a good thing.' No one could ever charge him with personal or narrow ambitions. It was always, as he once wrote, his own desire 'to be concealed in the crowd even when the field of honour appeared to ripen' before him; and his nephew says of him: 'Whowbeit he was verie hat in all questiones, yet when it twitched his particular,[29] no man could crab him, contrare to the common custome.' No one of braver spirit or truer mould has been among us, and we need to allow but little for the colouring of affection to accept James Melville's judgment: 'Scottland never receavit a graitter benefit at the hands of God than this man.' He is one of those great personalities of our history who have left us an example of the moral daring which is the greatest property of the human soul, and the spring of its noblest achievements. The struggle for the advancement of human wellbeing is carried on in ever-changing lines; the problems of the Church and the nation alter; the battlegrounds of freedom and progress shift; but this spiritual intrepidity and scorn of consequence ever remains the chief and most indispensable factor in the highest service of mankind. It is to men like Melville, who have a higher patriotism than that which is bounded by any earthly territory, whose country is the realm of Truth, whose loyalty transcends submission to any human sovereign, that every people owes its noblest heritage.