“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]