Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 1.djvu/98

 published at the end of an edition of the Psalms. The assembly also ordered that henceforth no book should be published till licensed by their commission. "Thus," it has been remarked, "the reformed clergy, who owed their emancipation to the right of private judgment, with strange inconsistency obstructed the progress of free inquiry by taking upon themselves the regulation of the press."

Arbuthnot was soon after appointed minister of the parishes of Arbuthnot and Logie-Buchan, and in 1569 he became Principal of the University of Aberdeen. He was a member of the General Assembly held at St Andrews in 1572, in which strenuous opposition was made to a scheme of church-government, called the "Book of Policy," which was invented by certain statesmen, at the head of whom was the Regent Morton, to restore the old titles of the church, and by means of titular incumbents, retain all the temporalities among themselves. In the General Assemblies held at Edinburgh in 1573 and 1577, Arbuthnot was chosen Moderator; and he appears to have been constantly employed, on the part of the church, in the commission for conducting the troublesome and tedious contest with the Regency concerning the plan of ecclesiastical government to be adopted in Scotland. This commission, under the name of the Congregation, ct length absorbed so much power, that the Assembly was left little to do but to approve its resolutions. The part which Arbuthnot took in these affairs gave offence to James VI., and the offence was increased by the publication of Buchanan's History, of which Arbuthnot was the editor. It was therefore resolved to restrain him by an oppressive act of arbitrary power; and a royal order was issued, forbidding him to absent himself from his college at Aberdeen. The clergy, who saw that the design of this order was to deprive them of the benefit of Arbuthnot's services, remonstrated: the king, however, remained inflexible, and the clergy submitted. This persecution probably affected Arbuthnot's health and spirits; for, the next year, 1583, he fell into a gradual decline and died. Arbuthnot appears to have possessed much good sense and moderation, and to have been well qualified for public business. His knowledge was various and extensive; he was a patron of learning; and at the same time that he was active in promoting the interests of the Reformed church, he contributed to the revival of a taste for literature in Scotland. The only prose production which he has left, is a learned and elegant Latin work, entitled "Orationes de Origine et Dignitate Juris,"—[Orations on the Origin and Dignity of the Law,] which was printed in 4to at Edinburgh in 1572. For some specimens of vernacular poetry, supposed to be his composition, we may refer to Irving's Lives of the Scottish Poets, and M'Crie's Life of Andrew Melville. His character has received a lasting eulogy, in the shape of an epitaph, from the pen of his friend Melville. See Delitiæ Poetarum Scotorum, ii. p. 120. 

, M.D. one of the constellation of wits in the reign of queen Anne, and the most learned man of the whole body, was the son of a Scottish clergyman, who bore a near relationship to the noble family of this name and title. He was born at Arbuthnot in Kincardineshire, soon after the Restoration, and received his education at the University of Aberdeen, where he took the degree of M.D. The father of Arbuthnot was one of those members of the church of Scotland, who, not being able to comply with the presbyterian system introduced at the Revolution, were obliged to resign their charges. He retired to a small estate, which he possessed by inheritance; while h;s sons, finding their prospects blighted in their own country, were under the necessity of going abroad to seek their fortune. John carried his jacobitism, his talents, and his knowledge of physic, to London, where he at first subsisted as a teacher of mathematics. His first literary effort bore a reference to this science: it was an "Examination of Dr Woodward's Account of the Deluge," a work which had