Scottish Text Society publications > Old series > Richt vay to the Kingdome of Heuine

INTRODUCTION.
xxi
Christiern in 1532 to regain his lost throne, and its sad end
in his surrender to his rival and lifelong imprisonment,1
Pedersen was permitted to return to Malmo, on coming
under an engagement to be loyal to the reigning sove¬
reign. He was not restored, however, to his canonry, and
had to depend for a precarious support on his literary
labours and the profits of his printing-press. He is be¬
lieved to have brought from Antwerp the well-known printer,
John Hochstraten, and in conjunction with him to have
published quite a number of books which he had written or
translated. Most of these were on the subject of religion,
which he had so deeply at heart, some on the history of his
native country, and two, at least, of which copies are
preserved in the Advocates’ Library, at Edinburgh, on
Medicine.2 These last were printed in the same year as
Gau’s work, and have the same device at the end—the figure
of Occasio, with bald hind-head and one lock of hair in front;
but instead of the usual motto, “ Carpe diem, post occasio
est calva,” the two Greek words, yvcodt iccupov.5 Gau may
certainly claim to have exemplified this motto, for no more
fitting time could have been chosen to prepare and print in
the Scottish tongue a detailed account of the way of salva¬
tion, and the teaching deduced by the Reformers from the
Scriptures, than the time when Alesius was preparing and
1 ‘Gerdesii Historia,’ vol. ili. p. 390. Sleidan’s ‘History of the Reforma¬
tion,’ under the year 1559. Seckendorf’s ‘ Commentarius,’ Lib. iii. § Ixxv. 9.
2 In Ersch and Gruber’s ‘ Encyclopedic,’ he is characterised as “einer der
bedeutendsten Gelehrten seiner Zeit, wissenschaftlicher und praktischer Theo-
log, aber auch erfahren in der Padagogik, in der Geschichte, in der Philologie,
in den schonen Wissenschaften, ja in der Arzneigelehrtheit.”
3 Sonnenstein Wendt informs us that the typography is in all respects the
same as that of a Danish treatise of Pedersen, printed at Malmb in 1532.
Though the engraved border of the title-page differs from that of Pedersen’s
‘Rette Vey,’ printed at Antwerp, it appears to have been the same with that
used in some other treatises printed by Hochstraten at Malmo in 1533.