James Melville’s nostalgic account of his schooldays reveals the intellectual rigour expected of young boys, a regimen of study that Melville took in his stride. The nephew of the famous Presbyterian reformer Andrew Melville, he later became a noted scholar, a proponent of religious reform, and, above all, an entertaining autobiographer.
My father put my eldest and only brother David, about a year and a half above me, and me together, to a relative and brother in the ministry of his, to school, a learned, kind man, who out of gratitude I name, Mr William Gray, minister at Logie Montrose. He had a sister, a godly and honest woman, ruler of his house, who often reminded me of my mother and was a very loving mother to me indeed. There were a good many of the country’s gentle and honest men’s children at the school, well trained both in letters, godliness, and exercises of honest games.
There we learned to read the Catechism, Prayers, and Scripture; to rehearse the Catechism and Prayers by heart; and there I first found (blessed be my God for it!) that spirit of holiness beginning to work in my heart, even when I was about eight and nine; to pray going to bed and rising, and being in the fields alone to say over the prayers I had learned, with a sweet moving in my heart; and to abhor swearing and rebuke and complain about those I heard swear. In which the example of that godly matron, who was sickly and given to reading and praying in her bed, did benefit me greatly; for I lay in her room and heard her devotions.
There we learned the rudiments of Latin grammar, with Latin and French vocabulary; also some French speech, with the correct reading and pronunciation of that language. We went further, to the Etymology of Lillius and his Syntax, and also a little of the Syntax of Linacer; to that was added Hunter’s Nomenclature, the Minora Colloquia of Erasmus, and some of the Eclogues of Virgil and Epistles of Horace; also Cicero’s Epistolis ad Terentiam …
There we also had good fresh air, and were taught by our master to handle the bow for archery, the club for golf, the sticks for fencing, also to run, to jump, to swim, to wrestle, to take part in competitions, every one having his match and antagonist, both in our lessons and games.
A happy and golden time indeed, if our negligence and ingratitude had not moved God to shorten it, partly because of the reduction of numbers, which caused the master to grow weary, and partly because of a disease which the Lord, for sin and contempt of his Gospel, sent upon Montrose, which was only two miles from Over Logie; so that the school dispersed, and we were all sent for and brought home.
I was at that school for almost five years, in which time, of public news, I remember I heard of the marriage of Henry and Mary, King and Queen of Scots, Seigneur David’s slaughter, of the King’s murder at the Kirk of Field, of the Queen’s taking at Carberry, and the Langside field … Also I clearly remember how we went to the top of the moor to see the fire of joy burning on the steeple head of Montrose on the day of the King’s birth.
[modified version, see Appendix V, p. 440]