John Knox was in every sense of the words a son of the soil, yet came of a not unknown family, "kent folk" of East Lothian: if not lairds of any great heritage, yet possessing lands and living sufficient to entitle them to consideration. They were able to give him the best education of the time, which he completed at the University of Glasgow under the teaching of Major or Mair, the same whom George Buchanan accompanied to France; so that both these great men, as well as various nobles and ecclesiastics of the time, were his fellow-students, trained under the same influence. Whether Knox followed Major to St. Andrews as Buchanan followed him to Paris is not known; but he would seem to have lectured on philosophy in St. Andrews at the beginning of his career. It might be that he was himself present, and heard some of the bold and familiar addresses of the wandering friars, the first rude champions of Reform, whose protest against the wickedness of the bishops and the extortions of the clergy he quotes with so much enjoyment of their rough humour, in the beginning of his history; or even might have witnessed the lighted pile and felt across his face the breath of that "reek" which carried spiritual contagion with it, as it flew upon the keen breeze from the sea over that little centre of life, full of scholars and wits, and keen cynical spectators little likely to be convinced by any such means. It is curious to hear of Major for instance, one of the Sorbonne, a doctor of Paris and man of the world, as present at all those proceedings, listening to Friar William's denunciation of the priests, to which he gave his assent as "a doctrine that might weill be defended, for it contayned no heresye"--and in very different circumstances to the sermons of Rough, addressed to the slayers of the Cardinal, and to the calling of Knox himself, a crisis of popular emotion and vehement feeling. Such a man as Major, a son of the Renaissance, no Reformer nor careful of any of these things, must have looked on with strange feelings at all the revolutions accomplished before him, the rude jests and songs, the half-jocular broadly humorous assaults, the cry of heresy, the horror of the burnings, the deadly earnest of both preacher and people after Beatoun's well-deserved but terrible end which cut all compromises short. One wonders what thoughts were going on in the mind of the old scholar who kept his place in his stall as well when mass was sung as when every trace of that "idolatrous sacrifice" had been trodden under foot. Would it be more or less the same to him whatever they preached, those wild religionists, who tore each other in pieces? did he look on with a secret smile at the turmoil they made, as if it mattered which was uppermost, with a natural horror at the fierce flames of the human sacrifice, yet consent in his mind that if they could so stamp the heresy out which would otherwise destroy them, the bishops were only