In deference to his dying injunctions, the Town Council appointed Mr. Henry Charteris, his favourite pupil, and then one of the regents, to be his successor in the principalship and in the professorship of Divinity. Looked back upon now through the dense radiance of the subsequent history of the University of Edinburgh, expanded as that University has been in the course of centuries into its present four-facultied completeness, each faculty of larger dimensions than Rollock could ever have dreamt of, and each with its memories of scores or hundreds of more or less shining celebrities that have belonged to it in past generations, Rollock himself, it must be admitted, dwindles into a mere telescopic star. That he is remembered at all now is due mainly to the fact that he was the first president of one of the most important institutions of the Scottish nation, and charged with the affairs of that institution in its struggling commencement, its “day of small things.” This in itself would be something. Many men have merited well of society simply because they have performed diligently the routine duties of the office they chanced to hold, and so have woven something of their own personality, though it may be hardly distinguishable afterwards, into the context of passing affairs and exigencies. Is this all, however, that we can say of Rollock? Not quite. Though the best of him is probably imbedded in the beginnings of the University of Edinburgh, and much of that even in the unrecorded beginnings, he _has_ left some memorials of himself besides. His writings, all or nearly all of a theological nature, some published during his life, and others edited after his death by admiring friends, are so considerable in bulk that even the selection of them reprinted by the Wodrow Society fills two thick volumes. The more important and formal of them were dogmatic treatises or analytical Latin commentaries on portions of Scripture, some of which were of sufficient ability, after their kind, to have won recognition from Beza and other foreign theologians. More interesting, however, now are the specimens that remain of Rollock’s popular sermons in the vernacular English, or rather the vernacular Scots, of his day. Two extracts from one of these sermons will enable us to know Rollock somewhat more intimately, and will give an idea at the same time of the tastes of the Edinburgh folks of those days in the matter of pulpit oratory.