Johnston, or JONSTON, ARTHUR

Johnston, or JONSTON, ARTHUR (1587-1641), eminent as a physician and still more so as a humanist, was born of an honourable family at Caskieben, Aberdeenshire, and educated at Marischal College and the university of Padua, where he graduated M.D., June 11, 1610. The same year (says Sir T. Urquhart) he was 'laureated poet at Paris and that most deservedly,' and thereafter visited many seats of learning on either side the Alps from Rome to Sedan, in which latter he sojourned long with his compatriot Andrew Melville, professor of Divinity in the university. For many years he practised medicine in France, whence his fame as a Latin poet spread over Europe. In 1625 appeared in London his elegy on James I., and about the same time he was appointed physician to King Charles. His Latin rendering of the Song of Solomon, dedicated to that monarch (Lond. 1633), contained a specimen of his translation of the Psalms of David into Latin verse, a work on which he had long been engaged, and which was published at Aberdeen in 1637. In that year he helped to bring out the Delitiae Poetarum Scotorum hujus Ævi Illustrium (Amsterdam, 2 vols. 12mo), a collection in which the scholarship, taste, and poetical power of his countrymen appear to signal advantage, and to which his own contributions are at once the most numerous and the best. On June 24, 1637, he accepted the post of rector of King's College, Aberdeen, and enhanced the lustre of that brilliant era in the university's annals. His avocations as court physician, however, kept him mainly in England, where his fame as man of letters and poet, as well as physician, was steadily increasing till 1641, when he died suddenly on a visit to Oxford. His translation of the Psalms, often reprinted at home and abroad, divides with Buchanan's still more famous version the palm of superiority in that field; but his command, at once comprehensive and refined, of Latin idiom and rhythmical movement, and his imagination, rich without extravagance, are even more conspicuous in his miscellanies, among which his proslusion on the great anatomist Casserio would suffice to keep him in the front rank of modern Latin poets. See the monograph by Principal Geddes of Aberdeen (1890).