It is in accordance with our estimate of Rollock all in all that, though, among the students sent forth from the University of Edinburgh during his Principalship, there were some who distinguished themselves subsequently by their force and hard-headedness in the routine affairs of the Scottish Kirk and State, we do not find any among them whom the historian of the higher thought and literature of Britain cares to remember now. Among the 284 Masters of Arts who left the University before Rollock died, the most memorable are perhaps these: Henry Charteris and Patrick Sands, pupils of Rollock’s own regency, and his successors in the principalship; Alexander Gibson of Durie, afterwards a judge of the Court of Session; James Sandilands, afterwards commissary of Aberdeen; Thomas Hope, afterwards Sir Thomas Hope, and of celebrity as a lawyer and as King’s Advocate; David Calderwood, the Presbyterian historian of the Kirk; and Robert Boyd of Trochrig, sometime minister in France, and afterwards Principal successively of the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh. To these may be added, as memorable on another ground, John Ruthven, Earl of Gowrie, and his brother Alexander Ruthven, the two young chiefs or victims of the mysterious Gowrie conspiracy of 1600. The elder brother, a favourite of Rollock’s, was a graduate of 1593, and the younger graduated in 1598. Other names of some interest to the Scottish literary antiquarian may be found in the list of the Edinburgh graduates of Rollock’s time, but hardly one now interesting to the general British muses. But, indeed, Scotland had then entered on a period of her history during which the higher and more meditative muses found themselves dismissed from her territory for a while. Precisely at the time when the University of Edinburgh was founded, the age of Scotland’s richest outburst in all forms of a thoroughly native literature had come to an end,—closed, we may say, by the deaths of Knox and Buchanan, save that in Napier of Merchiston there was one peculiar survivor. From that date onwards through the whole of the seventeenth century the energies of Scotland were to be locked up all but continually and exclusively in one protracted business of political and ecclesiastical controversy. From that date, accordingly, the successive batches of graduates sent forth from the four Scottish Universities,—or rather, we should now say, from the _five_ Scottish Universities, for the University of Marischal College, Aberdeen, was added as a fifth in 1593,—were absorbed, as clerics, lawyers, soldiers, and what not, into the service of a troubled social element requiring labours that left little sap in them for literary delights or for purely speculative exertions. Exceptions, of course, there are; and the two most notable of these belong to the University of Edinburgh. Drummond of Hawthornden was a graduate of that University in 1605, six years after Rollock’s death.