Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Thomas Dempster

DEMPSTER, THOMAS (1579-1625), a Scottish scholar, was born at Cliftbog, Aberdeenshire, and was the twenty- fourth of twenty-nine children of the same mother. From his earliest years he gave promise of the learned attainments which gained him contemporary celebrity and posthumous fame. At a very early age, qualified by the tuition of Thomas Cargill, his classical master in Aberdeen of whom he speaks in his Historia Ecclesiastica as vir literal issimus he entered Pembroke Hall, Cambridge. After having studied there for some time, he went to Paris, but did not continue his studies, on account of a contagious disease which closed the schools and prostrated himself. On his recovery he hastened to Louvain, where he was selected, along with other young Scotchmen, to go to Rome for the furtherance of his education. Through the kindness of Cardinal Cajetan, he became a student in the Roman semi nary ; but he had hardly begun the art of Latin versifica- tiou when serious illness required that he should leave Rome for change of climate. By way of Switzerland, he travelled to the Netherlands, and made a short stay at Tournay, to which he returned to teach humanity after a period of study at the university of Douai, where he distinguished himself in poetical and philosophical competitions, and took the degree of M.A. As his prospects in Tournay were discouraging, he went back to Paris, graduated as doctor of canon law, and became a regent in the college of Navarre, while yet, as he himself states, in his seventeenth year. Destined to be a wanderer through life, he soon quitted Paris to settle in Toulouse, where his stay was shortened by certain influential individuals, whose resentment he had excited by his advocacy of university rights. At Nimes, his next resting- place, he was, by twenty-three of the twenty-four judges, chosen to the professorship of eloquence in the Protestant university or academy, which circumstance colours in some degree the conjecture of Bayle, that his zeal for the Romish faith had somewhat cooled. Having retained his chair for little more than the two years of litigation into which he had been dragged by one of the unsuccessful candidates who had libellously assailed him, and against whom the Parliament of Toulouse decided, Dempster made a journey into Spain, whence, after a brief engagement as preceptor to a son of the famous Saint-Luc, he departed for his native land. As he did not experience a favourable recep tion either from his relatives or from the clergy, he remained but a short time, and again betook himself to Paris, There he spent seven years with advantage to his reputation and purse, as regent in different colleges. His connection with that of Beauvais, over which he presided for a time, was brought to a close by a high-handed procedure illustrative of his fierce courage, and suggestive of his fitness for other than literary contests. In the year 1615 he accepted the invitation of King James to come to London, and was honoured and rewarded by that sovereign. But dis appointed of preferment, which clerical and episcopal pre judices influenced the king to withhold, he again left England for Italy. On his arrival in Rome he was at first suspected of being a spy, but when his claims were ascertained, he was so fortunate as to receive letters of recommendation from the Pope and other influential personages to the duke of Tuscany, which issued in his appointment to the professorship of the Pandects in the university of Pisa. Writings of this date attest his com petency for the chair. After his inaugural lecture his reputation and emoluments increased. In the following year, on a visit to England, his disputatious spirit brought him into collision with an English ecclesiastic, whose representation of the quarrel led the grand duke to re quire that Dempster should either apologize or leave the country. Rather than make the prescribed apology he quitted Florence with the intention of settling in Scotland ; but he was prevailed upon by Cardinal Capponi to stay at Bologna, and in a few days, by the influence of the cardinal, was appointed to the chair of humanity, which he filled with the utmost efficiency and increase of fame. Honours, civil and literary, were bestowed upon him, and it seemed as if his wanderings and reverses had together come to an end. But the crowning calamity of his life then befell him. His light-headed wife (he married her in London in 1615), whose beauty had always been a snare to her, eloped with one of his students ; and the mental distress and bodily fatigue consequent on his pursuit of the fugitives, during the dog days, predisposed him to fever, which attacked him and proved fatal. He died at Bologna in 1625, in his forty-sixth year. Morally his chief defect was the fierceness of his temperament, which involved him in many broils, and made his sword and pen alike formidable. His natural impetuosity, which so easily broke forth in ebul litions of violence, explains in large measure the looseness and recklessness of statement often found in his writings. His intellectual qualifications entitle him to be considered " one of the most learned men whom Scotland has pro duced." A vast memory, which was the receptacle of many books ; an extraordinary familiarity with Greek and Latin, that enabled him to improvise verses in these tongues with the utmost rapidity ; and a versatility which made versification, philological discussions, classical criticism, juridical expositions, biographical narratives, and historical annals congenial to him, these endowments give him a high place among the learned. The defects of his writings were mainly due to the passionateness which often clouded his judgment, to a patriotic vanity that led to absurd exaggerations on Scotch subjects, and to the disturbing influence of a restless life. For list of his very numerous writings see Irving s Lives of the Scottish Writers.^