Rollock was then in his forty-fourth year. He could look back on his services in connection with Edinburgh University as the most important work of his life. He had seen fifteen sessions of that University begun and ended, during four of which he had been senior regent or Arts professor, and during the remaining eleven Principal and Professor of Theology. He had seen eleven graduations and a total of 284 Edinburgh Masters of Arts sent forth by these graduations into the world. The University, it is true, remained still but a fragment of what a complete university ought to have been. It contained as yet no Faculty of Law and no Faculty of Medicine. For education in these professions Scottish students had still to resort to foreign universities, as indeed they had to do for more than a century yet to come. But it was something to have established a Theological Faculty and a Faculty of Arts. The Theological Faculty was still represented entire in Rollock’s own person; but in the Arts Faculty, on which the University depended most, he had seen thirteen regents after himself appointed. The tenure of office of most of these had been vexatiously short, drawn off as they had been by the more tempting emoluments of parish-charges and the like; but the four who were now in office as regents,—Mr. Henry Charteris, Mr. Charles Ferme, Mr. John Adamson, and Mr. William Craig,—were all graduates of the University itself, and therefore all Rollock’s own men. Moreover, the Arts Faculty had just been increased by the institution of a separate Professorship of Humanity, distinct from the four rotating regencies. To this professorship, the first holder of which was a certain excellent Mr. John Ray, fell a part of the work that had formerly been assigned to the regents of the first and second classes: viz. instruction mainly in Latin, but also in elementary Greek and the rudiments of rhetoric. Such was the staff of Edinburgh University as Rollock left it. Though yet but in the prime of manhood, he had been long in ill-health, and was now suffering from a painful and incurable disease. There are affectionate details of his death-bed doings and sayings: how he sent messages to the King, how the ministers and leading citizens of Edinburgh visited him, what advices he gave them, what pious ejaculations he uttered, and how, in especial, he spoke of the University of his love, and recommended it to the care of those who had the power to promote its interests. On the 9th of February 1599, the sixteenth session of the University being then in progress, he breathed his last. There was a great concourse of citizens of all ranks at his funeral, and all over Scotland the rumour ran that the nation was poorer by the loss of the eminent Rollock. Verses in Latin, Greek, and English, by old pupils and others, were showered upon his grave. He left a widow, whom the Magistrates and Town Council of Edinburgh pensioned; and a daughter, posthumously born, was also provided for.