himself of the facilities for linguistic studies provided there, or to enjoy personal intercourse with Erasmus, the patron of the new learning. He is said while there to have made great progress in the languages and in philosophy, and to have been specially attracted towards the philosophy of Plato. With the Sophists of Louvain, as Luther terms them, he could have had no sympathy. But there were some there, as well as at Paris, whose hearts God had touched, to whom he could not fail to be drawn. He may even have met with those Augustinian monks of Antwerp whom these Sophists so soon after his departure sent to heaven in a chariot of fire, and whose martyrdom unsealed in Luther's breast the fount of sacred song. In the autumn of 1522, or the spring of 1523, he returned to Scotland, and, after a brief visit to his relatives in Linlithgowshire, appears to have come on to St Andrews. Probably, along with Alesius, Buchanan, and John Wedderburn, he there heard those lectures on the Gospels which Major afterwards published in Paris and dedicated to the Archbishop of St Andrews and other prominent churchmen in Scotland. But his sympathies were more with the young canons of the Augustinian priory than with the Old Scholastic; and probably it was that he might take a place among the teachers of their daughter college of St Leonard's that he was received as a member of the Faculty of Arts. Skilled in the art of sacred music, which the _alumni_ of that college were bound specially to cultivate, he composed what the musicians call a mass, arranged in parts for nine voices, and acted himself as leader of the choir when it was sung in the cathedral. He is said to have taken on him the priesthood about this time, that he might be formally admitted "to preach the word of God." But he was not then of age for priests' orders, and Dr David Laing is doubtful if he was in orders at all, and certainly no mention is made of his degradation from orders before his martyrdom, and the final summons of Betoun seems to imply that he had never been authorised to preach at all. [Sidenote: Parliament and Heresy.]