Studies.]

Patrick Hamilton was born in 1503 or 1504 at Stonehouse in Lanarkshire,
or at Kincavel near Linlithgow. His father, a natural son of the first
Lord Hamilton, had been knighted for his bravery, and rewarded by his
sovereign with the above lands and barony. His mother was a daughter of
Alexander, Duke of Albany, the second son of James II., so that he had
in his veins the noblest blood in the land. His cousins, John and James
Hamilton, were in due time raised to episcopal rank in the unreformed
church of Scotland, and several others of his relations received high
ecclesiastical promotion. Marked out for a similar destiny, Patrick was
carefully educated, and, according to the corrupt custom of the time,
was in his fourteenth year appointed to the Abbacy of Ferne in
Ross-shire, to enable him to maintain himself in comfort while
continuing his studies abroad. Like many of his aristocratic countrymen
he went first to the University of Paris, and probably to the College of
Montaigu, where Major, the great Scottish scholastic doctor, was then
teaching with much _eclat_, and gathering round him there, as afterwards
at St Andrews, an ardent band of youthful admirers, several of whom in
the end were to advance beyond their preceptor, and to lend the
influence of their learning and piety to the side of Luther and the
reformers. Before the close of 1520 he took the degree of M.A. at the
University of Paris, and soon after left Paris for Louvain, to avail
himself of the facilities for linguistic studies provided there, or to
enjoy personal intercourse with Erasmus, the patron of the new learning.
He is said while there to have made great progress in the languages and
in philosophy, and to have been specially attracted towards the
philosophy of Plato. With the Sophists of Louvain, as Luther terms them,
he could have had no sympathy. But there were some there, as well as at
Paris, whose hearts God had touched, to whom he could not fail to be
drawn. He may even have met with those Augustinian monks of Antwerp whom
these Sophists so soon after his departure sent to heaven in a chariot
of fire, and whose martyrdom unsealed in Luther's breast the fount of
sacred song. In the autumn of 1522, or the spring of 1523, he returned
to Scotland, and, after a brief visit to his relatives in
Linlithgowshire, appears to have come on to St Andrews. Probably, along
with Alesius, Buchanan, and John Wedderburn, he there heard those
lectures o