ed brother-in-law, Carstairs, which, it is well known, was of a most exalted, though irregular kind. In 1699, he acted as commissioner for all the five universities, in endeavouring to obtain some assistance for those institutions. He succeeded in securing a yearly grant of £1200 sterling, of which £300 was bestowed upon his own college. While exerting himself for the public, principal Dunlop regarded little his own immediate profit or advantage: besides his principalship, the situation of historiographer for Scotland, with a pension of £40 a year, is stated to have been all that he ever personally experienced of the royal bounty. He died in middle life, March, 1700, leaving behind him a most exalted character: “his singular piety,” says Wodrow, with whom he was connected by marriage, “great prudence, public spirit, universal knowledge, general usefulness, and excellent temper, were so well known, that his death was as much lamented as perhaps any one man’s in this church.”
Principal Dunlop left two sons, both of whom were distinguished men. Alexander, who was born in America, and died in 1742, was an eminent professor of Greek in the Glasgow university, and author of a Greek Grammar long held in esteem. William was professor of divinity and church history in the university of Edinburgh, and published the well known collection of creeds and confessions, which appeared in 1719 and 1722 (two volumes), as a means of correcting a laxity of religious opinion, beginning at that time to be manifested by some respectable dissenters. To this work was prefixed an admirable essay on confessions, which has since been reprinted separately. Professor William Dunlop, after acquiring great celebrity, both as a teacher of theology and a preacher, died October 29th, 1720, at the early age of twenty-eight.
DUNS, John de, (Scotus,) that is, “John of Dunse, Scotsman,” an eminent philosopher, was born in the latter part of the thirteenth century.
The thirteenth and part of the fourteenth centuries are distinguished, in the history of philosophy, as the scholastic age, in which the Aristotelian logic and metaphysics were employed, to an absurd and even impious degree, in demonstrating and illustrating the truths of the Holy Scriptures. Among the many scholars of Europe, who, during this period, perverted their talents in the exposition of preposterous dogmas and the defence of a false system of philosophy, John de Dunse, called the Subtle Doctor, was perhaps the most celebrated. So famous indeed was he held for his genius and learning, that England and Ireland have contended with Scotland for the honour of his birth. His name, however, seems to indicate his nativity beyond all reasonable dispute. Though convenience has induced general modern writers to adopt the term Scotus as his principal cognomen, it is evidently a signification of his native country alone; for Erigena, and other eminent natives of Scotland in early times, are all alike distinguished by it in their learned titles; these titles, be it observed, having been conferred in foreign seminaries of learning. John of Dunse points as clearly as possible to the town of that name in Berwickshire, where, at this day, a spot is pointed out as the place of his birth, and a branch of his family possessed, till the beginning of the last century, a small piece of ground, called in old writings, “Duns’s Half of Grueldykes.” Those who claim him as a native of England set forward the village of Dunstane in Northumberland as the place of his birth; but while the word Dunse[1] is exactly his name, Dunstane is not so, and therefore, without other proof, we must hold the English locality as a mere dream. The Irish claimants again say, that, as Scotia was the ancient name of Ireland, Scotus must have been an Irishman. But it happens that Scotland and Ireland bore their present
- ↑ It is a common story that the term Dunce is derived from the name of the philosopher, but in an oblique manner; a stupid student termed another Dunse, on the same principle as a person of heavy intellect in general life is sometimes termed a bright man.
