As I have hinted, there were some in the city to whom such discourses could not fail to be distasteful--some who refused to attend on his ministry, and were perhaps so stung by what was reported of his sharp but not undeserved reproofs that they were compelled to throw off the mask they had hitherto worn, and soon after openly to apostatise from the faith which for several years they had professed and taught. But the effect on many of the young men in attendance on the university, or acting as regents in its colleges, was salutary and enduring; and perhaps it was not without special intention that, when the door was shut against him in Edinburgh and the ears of the men in power there were closed against his counsels, he betook himself to what was still the principal university in the realm, and made his last appeals to the rising hopes of the church and country there. Such discourses as he then delivered, coming from one they had already learned to venerate, could not fail to form or foster in their ingenuous minds that fidelity to the reformed faith, that jealousy of popery, and that hatred of its cruelty and tyranny, which distinguished them to the last. [Sidenote: Melville's sketch of Knox.] James Melville, whose plastic nature and gentle spirit retained through life the impressions then made, supplements in his Diary the notices in Bannatyne's Memorials, and, in a passage which has been often quoted, gives a very fresh and vivid sketch of the old reformer. "Bot of all the benefites I haid that yeir"--the first year he was a student in St Andrews, and had "drunk of St Leonard's well"--"the greatest," he tells us, "was the coming of that maist notable profet and apostle of our nation, Mr Jhone Knox, to St Androis; wha be the faction of the Quein occupeing the castell and town of Edinbruche was compellit to remove thairfra with a number of the best, and chusit to com to St Androis. I hard him teatche ther the prophecie of Daniel that simmer and the wintar following. I haid my pen and my litle book, and tuk away sic things as I could comprehend. In the opening upe of his text he was moderat the space of an halff houre; bot when he enterit to application he maid me sa to grew and tremble that I could nocht hald a pen to wryt. I hard him oftymes utter these thretenings [against the faction then] in the hicht of their pryde, quhilk the eis [_i.e._, eyes] of monie saw cleirlie brought to pass within few yeirs upon the captean of that castle, the Hamiltones, and the Quein hirselff. He ludgit down in the Abbay besyde our Collage."[228] So far was it from being true, as is commonly asserted, that he had caused the destruction of the abbey and of the abbey church or cathedral in 1559, that in 1571 he found a habitable building there, in which he, a frail old man, with his wife and children, could pass the winter in comfort. It, we know from a letter of his antagonist, Archibald Hamilton, was "the new ludgene of the