Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 3.djvu/39

Rh tell you what reward you shall get for your lenity; these two men shall trample on your necks, and the necks of the whole ministry of Scotland." The one was afterwards archbishop of St Andrews, and the other of Glasgow.—We quote the following from Wodrow's MS. "Lives of Scottish Clergymen." When Davidson was about to rebuild the church of Prestonpans, "a place was found most convenient upon the lands of a small heritor of the parish, called James Pinkerton. Mr Davidson applied to him, and signified that such a place of his land, and five or six acres were judged most proper for building the church and churchyard dyke, and he behoved to sell them." The other said "he would never sell them, but he would freely gift those acres to so good a use;" which he did. Mr Davidson said, "James, ye shall be no loser, and ye shall not want a James Pinkerton to succeed you for many generations:" and hitherto, as I was informed some years ago, there has been, still a James Pinkerton succeeding to that small heritage in that parish, descending from him; and after several of them had been in imminent danger when childless.

DEMPSTER,, a learned professor and miscellaneous writer, was born at Brechin, in the shire of Angus, sometime in the latter part of the sixteenth century. Of his family or education nothing certain has been preserved, farther than that he studied at Cambridge. In France, whither he went at an early period of his life, and where probably he received the better part of his education, he represented himself as a man of family, and possessed of a good estate, which he had abandoned for his religion, the Roman catholic. He was promoted to a professor's chair at Paris, in the college of Beauvais. Bayle says, that though his business was only to teach a school, he was as ready to draw his sword as his pen, and as quarrelsome as if he had been a duellist by profession; scarcely a day passed, he adds, in which he did not fight either with his sword or at fisty cuff's, so that he was the terror of all the school-masters. Though he was of this quarrelsome temper himself, it does not appear however that he gave any encouragement to it in others; for one of his students having sent a challenge to another, he had him horsed on the back of a fellow-student, and whipped him upon the seat of honour most severely before a full class. To revenge this monstrous affront, the scholar brought three of the king's lifeguards-men, who were his relations, into the college. Dempster, however, was not to be thus tamed. He caused hamstring the lifeguards men's horses before the college gate; themselves he shut up close prisoners in the belfrey, whence they were not relieved for several days. Disappointed of their revenge in this way, the students had recourse to another. They lodged an information against his life and character, which not choosing to meet, Dempster fled into England. How long he remained, or in what manner he was employed there, we have not been informed; but he married a woman of uncommon beauty, with whom he returned to Paris. Walking the streets of Paris with his wife, who, proud of her beauty, had bared a more than ordinary portion of her breast and shoulders, which were of extreme whiteness, they were surrounded by a mob of curious spectators, and narrowly escaped being trodden to death. Crossing the Alps, he obtained a professor's chair in the university of Pisa, with a handsome salary attached to it. Here his comfort, and perhaps his usefulness was again marred by the conduct of his beautiful wife, who at length eloped with one of his scholars. Previously to this, we suppose, for the time is by no means clearly stated, he had been professor in the university of Mimes, which he obtained by an honourable competition in a public dispute upon a passage of Virgil. "This passage," he says himself, "was proposed to me as a difficulty not to be solved, when I obtained the professorship in the royal college of Nimes, which was disputed for by a great number of candidates, and