This may be looked upon as a strong confirmation of the date which we have assigned as that of Claverhouse’s birth. That he should begin his academic course in his twenty-second year and continue it up to the age of twenty-five, would have been quite contrary to the custom of a period when Scottish undergraduates, more particularly those belonging to the leading families of the country, were even more youthful than many of them are at the present day. It has generally been assumed that Claverhouse remained at St Andrews for the full period of three years; but the University register supplies no evidence in support of this. On the contrary, the absence of John Graham’s name from the list of those of his class-mates who graduated in due course, justifies the belief that his studies were brought to a premature close before 1668. To what extent he availed himself of the opportunities afforded him during such stay as he may have made at St Andrews, is a matter with regard to which proof is wholly wanting and testimony only bare and vague. Dr Monro, the Principal of the College of Edinburgh, in his answer to the charge brought against him on the ground of ‘his rejoicing the day that the news of Claverhouse his victory came to the town,’ admitted that he had not ‘rejoiced at the fall of my Lord Dundee,’ for whom he ‘had an extraordinary value’; and he challenged any ‘gentleman, soldier, scholar or civilized citizen’ to find fault with him for holding the fallen leader’s memory in respect. From this, the utterance of one well qualified by personal acquaintance to form a competent judgment, and unlikely, from his training and education to express it in inconsiderate terms of meaningless exaggeration, it has been argued that the subject of Monro’s eulogy must have possessed the attainments upon which men of culture naturally set store. In support of this warrantable inference, there is the statement of a writer who, though not a contemporary, is undeniably a well-informed chronicler. The author of the Memoirs of Sir Ewan Cameron says that Claverhouse ‘had ane education suitable to his birth and genius.’ According to the same authority, he ‘made a considerable progress in the mathematicks, especially in those parts of it that related to his military capacity; and there was no part of the Belles Lettres which he had not studyed with great care and exactness. He was much master in the epistolary way of writeing; for he not onely expressed himself with great ease and plaineness, but argued well, and had a great art in giving his thoughts in few words.’