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 THE PORTRAITS OF JOHN KNOX. 221 unknown to Beza, the place very indistinctly known. Beza reports him to have studied with great distinc- tion under John Major at St. Andrews; the fact being that he was one winter under Major at Glasgow, but never under Major at St. Andrews, nor ever a university student elsewhere at all ; that his admired neological prelections at St. Andrews are a creature of the fancy ; and in short that Beza's account of that early period is mere haze and ignorant hallucination. Having received the order of priesthood, thinks Beza, he set to lecturing in a so valiantly neological tone in Edinburgh and elsewhere that Cardinal Beaton could no longer stand it ; but truculently summoned him to appear in Edinburgh on a given day, and give account of himself; whereupon Knox, evading the claws of this man-eater, secretly took himself away ' to Hamestoniim,' — a town or city unkno^^l to geo- gi^aphers, ancient or modern, but which, according to Beza, was then and there the one refuge of the pious, unicum tunc piorum asylum. Towards this refuge Cardinal Beaton thereupon sent assassins (entirely imaginary), who would for certain have cut off Knox in his early spring, had not God's providence com- ¥