Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 6.djvu/349

Rh and culd not haif any equall condition of leving, na not the least provision." He accordingly returned to his charge at the West church. In 1584, when James struck a blow at the church, by rendering it criminal to decline the jurisdiction of the privy council, and to hold assemblies without the royal permission, Pont added his name to the list of the gallant defenders of the church, by solemnly protesting against the acts as they were published at the cross of Edinburgh, on the ground that they had been passed without the knowledge or consent of the church Two days before, (23rd May, 1584,) he had been deprived of his seat in the College of Justice, by an act prohibiting ecclesiastics to hold civil appointments, and he now, with many of the clergy, who were alarmed at so bold an inroad, fled to England. He returned to Scotland with the earl of Angus and his party, a few months afterwards, and resumed his ministerial duties. In 1587, he was nominated to the bishopric of Caithness; but the assembly refused to ratify the appointment. In 1591, the assembly appointed him to write against sacrilege; his Three Sermons on that subject were approved of, and ordered to be printed by the Presbytery of Edinburgh, November 12, 1594 (See Records), but from some unknown cause, were not published till 1599. In 1594, he published "A New Treatise on the right reckoning of Yeares and Ages of the World," for the purpose of showing that the year 1600 was not, as his countrymen supposed, the proper year of the jubilee. In 1601, he was appointed by the General Assembly to revise the Psalms. In 1596 and 1602, he was chosen commissioner of Orkney, and his name was first in the list of those who were intended for the qualified prelacies. In 1604, he published a tract on the union of the kingdoms, "De Unione Britanniae, seu de Regnorum Angliæ et Scotiæ omniumque adjacentium insularum in unam Monarchiam consolidatione, deque multiplici ejus Unionis utilitate Dialogus." Mr Fraser Tytler, who appears to have perused it, says, "This political treatise, which is written in Latin, in the form of a dialogue between three fictitious speakers, Irenæus, Polyhistor, and Hospes, is chiefly valuable from its furnishing us with some curious pictures of the political state of the country, and the rude manners of the times. The picture he presents of the intolerable tyranny of the nobles in their strong and remote fortresses, of the impotency of the arm of the law, and the personal terrors of the judges, who trembled before these petty princes, very completely proves that there was no poetical exaggeration in the verses of Sir Richard Maitland." Pont died on the 8th May, 1606, and was interred, it is said, in the church of St Cuthbert's, where a monument was erected to his memory, with an epitaph, partly in English, partly in very questionable Latin. He had prepared a more ample edition of his work on the Jubilee Year, which was published in quarto, in 1619. Besides these works Pont wrote Chronologia de Sabbatis, published at London in 1626. His Aureum Seculum, his Translation of Pindar's Olympic Odes, his Dissertation on the Greek Lyric Metres, his Lexicon of Three Languages, and Collection of Homilies, all of which David Buchanan says he saw in MS. are now nowhere to be found.

PONT,, the celebrated geographer who prepared the "Theatrum Scotiæ," in "Bleau's Atlas," was the eldest son of the preceding, apparently by his first wife, Catharine Masterton, daughter of Masterton of Grange.