Cardinals, probably not sorry to be rid of the overbearing scholar, made his way to the court of Cosmo of Florence, who in 1616 (the first date of which we can be sure in his life) appointed him professor of the Pandects at the Tuscan University of Pisa.

He was now happy. His professorship no doubt sat lightly enough upon him: he could teach and teach easily for hours each day, and yet have leisure enough for the customary amusement of scholars of his day, and that was writing. He wrote incessantly, editing here, augmenting there, and occasionally giving to the world something of his own proper wit. His Court poems, written to order on Laureate's lines, are certainly dull enough. They are as it were the embodiment in very detestable hexameters of the painted allegories of Versailles. But one jeu d'esprit of his in the fashion beloved of the times does deserve notice. "The Fly," he calls it, but it might be termed "The Midge," for it contains what are obviously autobiographical reminiscences of that malicious ephemeris and of the brutal cleg as they are found in the North of Scotland to this day. Even elephants, he says, are driven wild by these beasts. He may have heard of the tsetse-fly of Africa, and he probably knew the mosquito of Italy intimately; but, as a true patriot, he has a word to say in favour even of the midge: twenty-one of them boiled and drunk form an infallible cure for the headache. To Sutherland anglers we commend this re

cipe, for to drink midges would at least give one some feeling of satisfied revenge. Dempster is less happy when he undertakes tragedy: the "Abolition of the Decemvirate "—the title is as prosy as the play-is as bad a degradation of the story of Virginia as can well be imagined; it is Livy cut up into iambics; but all the same he got it acted in Paris, with a Scottish boy-a Hay-as the heroine, and apparently with

some success.

Inspired by the genius loci, he now undertook his great work, the first book on ancient Etruria. Etruria, like South Africa, has been, though in another sense, the grave of reputations. The mysterious remains of her antiquities will only yield their secret, if they ever do, to personal exploration, and that Dempster never undertook. He was content to copy and to conjecture. His knowledge was not sufficient, any more than that of his contemporaries, to enable him to distinguish between genuine Etruscan paintings and those of Greek superimposition, and the value of his labours was, from a modern point of view, small indeed. The book was never published in his lifetime, but a century later Coke of Norfolk, afterwards Earl of Leicester, "found" the manuscript in his library and published it in two sumptuous volumes at his own expense. It is a marvel of eruditionno more. And the mystery of the Etruscan race and of the Etruscan language still remains unsolved. To complete the work, Thomas got leave

(and money) from the Grand Duke to go to England and purchase and bring back books. He also brought back Susanna Valeria.

When Fynes Moryson, the ingenious English gentleman who got the better of the idol at Loretto by helping himself out of the collection-box, wrote his 'Itinerary,' he spake of costumes of different nations, and noted that English women were distinguished for their display of shoulders. He goes further, but we cannot follow him, and refuse to believe him. But Mistress Dempster appearing at Paris in what Boswell describes as the "perfectly insane" habit of her countrywomen, and no doubt conscious of the charm of her fair English skin, outraged the feelings of the inhabitants of that virtuous capital. Inspired by indignation or admiration, when she appeared abroad "in a certain light," whatever that may mean, crowds followed her, and she and her husband had to take refuge in a house to avoid being crushed to death. But they got to Italy without further mishap, and Thomas resumed his prelections with the comfortable salary of 400 ducats a-year, and all went merry as a marriage - bell. But into this Eden crept a serpent: the Professor said it was a perfidious Englishman; others said it took the form of his own pupils. In any case, returning from his lectures on the Pandects one day Dempster found his citadel (another reading says his cash-box: there is but the difference of a single vowel in the Latin) captured,

as

and his Susanna gone. He promptly accused the Englishman, who indignantly denied the charge, and appealed to the Grand Duke with such effect that Dempster was told that he must either apologise or go. Apologies were unfamiliar to him; migrations were not; and he chose the latter alternative, leaving behind him (it would appear) the "Etruria," to be gathered in by the Norfolk squire near a century later. That he bore the loss of his wife with equanimity, scandalous little Rossi, his biographer, tells us, is surely untrue. He never bore any. thing with equanimity, and he was devoted, for his sins, to his fair and frail English wife. She had borne him a little daughter, to whom the great ones of the earth stood sponsors-Cardinal Barberini, afterwards Pope, and Maria Magdalena, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, and sister of Ferdinand, fateful Emperor of Germany: but the child had died in infancy.

With his reputation it was not likely that Dempster would have far to go before finding a post, and indeed he had no sooner quitted that at Pisa than he chanced upon a better. He would, he said, go back to Scotland to take up that old lawsuit again; but calling on Cardinal Capponi, the Pope's legate at Bologna, to pay his respects, he found that prelate ready with a professorship for him, and, sweeter still, a readymade quarrel. For the chair of Humanities, which was to be his, was by prescriptive right to take precedence over

all others in the

famous university, and this had been disputed. For such a case Dempster was the very man. In vain did rival professors remonstrate and even stir up the turbulent student crowd against him. The black-avised Scot overbore all opposition, maintained his professorship and his precedence, and, what is more, seems to have made himself greatly beloved. He was admitted into the "Academy of Night"-one of those strange dilettante societies which served to amuse the utterly vapid lives of the better-class Italians of the day, and appeared therein under the meaningless name of "Evancio." He might seem to have fallen upon halcyon days. But that siren, Susanna Valeria, was destined yet to work him woe. With more credit to his heart than to his head he had received her back, and with her return it would appear there came again upon the scene that dour Englishman from whom he had already endured much for her sake and to the enemy's assistance had now come "Irish beggars" that is to say, the whole body of Hibernians resident abroad, whom Dempster had succeeded in making bitter foes of. The case fell out on this wise.

In the year 1620 there came to Paris a certain Daniel Roth, titular Romanist Bishop of Ossory, a worthy soul enough, and afterwards under Cromwell's rule something very like a martyr. At some religious function, where a number of his countrymen were present,

he delivered a mighty patriotic lecture on Saint Bridget, and one of her miracles-not a very striking one, being merely the turning of a dead twig into 8 green one again. Now, Dempster had just before published a 'Nomenclature of Scottish Writers,' in which he claimed for his native country wellnigh every saint in the Irish Calendar. His mistake was quite a genuine one. He found the epithet "Scotus" attached to many of the names in ecclesiastical writers, and he would have been in advance of most of his contemporaries if he had recognised that down to a certain date this meant "Irish." Accordingly he swept them all into the Caledonian net, Bridget and Brandan and Patrick and all, down to Duns. On this so shameless appropriation the Bishop of Ossory thought it necessary to make a few observations, relatively mild in character considering the ordinary tone of controversy at the time, and appended them to the printed edition of his discourse on Bridget. Dempster arose in his might, the more angry because he was wrong. In forty-eight hours he read the book, near 200 pages of close print, and wrote an answer of 90 pages, "quoting many authors"; and such an answer! "Scotia Illustrior," he called it. It was really one long attack upon the distressful island and her sons. "Encourage the Irish in Paris," quotha! what Irish "of that hostile nation" were there there except a few "gallowsbirds-knights they call

them, ragged, half naked, and dirty?" Roth's book itself was "an unclean offscouring, trivial stuff, of no eloquence and less learning, concocted by a brotherhood of beggars"; and Scotland for ever!

Now this was hard. It was a century later, indeed, when it could be claimed that

the treasury of England and enervated its manhood? Scotland! What has brought down that noble nation to the ground, sold its dignities, and made its honours cheap? Scotland! Who persecutes the English recusants and makes money out of their fines? Scotland! What has driven the folk of the first flower of the earth

to Belgrade

Lie the soldiers and chiefs of the Irish Brigade,"

but already Irishmen were known as brave men and good comrades in every European army.

For once Dempster had encountered a hard controversial nut to crack, and we may say that he broke his teeth on it. Two replies promptly appeared, in which we recognise all the amenities of Irish eloquence grafted on the sturdy stem of the vituperation common to the times. It is difficult to award the prize for fluent abuse either to the "Justification" of Ireland or to her "Resurrection." They run a dead heat. Of course it was easy enough to point out Thomas's mistake about "Scots' and "Scotia" but this did not satisfy the Irishmen : what rankled in their minds was the term "beggars," which Dempster had freely employed. "What!" said the Justificator; "talk to us of beggary when we are always exporting of salmon and foxskins and donkeys to France itself? Beggars! What is the staple of derision on the English stage but the beggarliness of the Scots ? What has exhausted

exile? Scotland! Neither the wealth of England nor the broad acres of Ireland can satisfy the greedy maw of Scots!" We pause for a moment to notice the loyalty to England here expressed-so strongly in contrast with the language of later times. There is no reason to doubt its genuineness. Daniel Roth, who was probably himself the author of the pamphlet, was so much of a loyal subject, and so little of an ultramontane, that he afterwards got into serious trouble with a papal nuncio who tried to propagate sedition in Ireland. But this is by the way: the Justificator's language was milk - and - water compared with that which announced the Resurrection of Hibernia.' After accusing Dempster with more or less truth of conveying saints from every calendar in Europe, even from the Goths, the defender of the island sums up his opinion of the conveyer: "Ye fled from France; ye will be chased from Italy. Scotland endured you not; England could not hold you; Belgium banished you. What refuge have ye, save like a serpent, outcast from human society, to creep on the ground, to eat dust, choked with your

own poison and hiccupping out your own malice? Go get ye to a cave, and there hide, hopeless and outlawed, bereft of sense, devoid of wits, buried for ever in the shades of horrid night!" Compared with such eloquence as this, the language of the Land League and the prefaces of German editors a century ago appear tame. And this between co-religionists too! No wonder both Dempster's book and the reply were prohibited by the Church. As to Thomas, he seems to have published no rejoinder: he was in his cave eating dust prepared for him by the persistent Englishman.

The definite accusation brought against him was that of heresy, and for this Dempster had given handle enough. Violent language about Queen Elizabeth did not counterbalance the facts of his conduct at Nismes and in England, when the hope of prebends and preferment had dazzled him. Nay, he held, or at least afterwards expressed, opinions more honest than politic about the massacre of Saint Bartholomew's Day. The Englishman and his furious Hibernian helpers had little difficulty in drawing up a charge of heresy, and Dempster, ever ready for a paper war, made their task easier by writing the Englishman a letter which needed only to be translated into choice Italian and sent to Rome to substantiate the accusation. Thither Dempster had to go in person, and found his case already half decided against him. He succeeded, however, in pacifying the Pope, and a

kind of hollow peace was patched up between him and his accuser. However, says Thomas, if that Englishman ever so far forgets himself again, he has a pamphlet ready written which shall be published and draw down the curses of posterity on the wretch's head.

For five years longer he abode and taught at Bologna, working and writing incessantly, though many of his works, like the 'Etruria,' seem to have remained unpublished. We have, however, his inaugural address on his admission to his professorship-a pretty performance, full of gracefully turned compliments to "Cisalpine Gaul," and much higher praise of his beloved Scotland. But the end, when it came, was sad enough. Again his worthless wife abandoned him and fled with a paramour towards Vicenza, whither he was foolish enough to pursue her, instead of thanking Heaven that he was rid of her. Like a mad Northerner as he was, moreover, he must travel posthaste in the dog-days, and on his return from his fruitless journey took the fever at Butrio: in place of leaving him there in peace, his friends. carried him off to Bologna, where, on September 6, 1625, he died, and was buried in Saint Dominic's, his friends of the Academy of Night making themselves and him ridiculous by an epitaph in which they assured the world that it had been better for History, Poetry, Laws, and Letters to lie buried. rather than Thomas Dempster.

For years before his death