VOLUSENUS, Florentius (that is, Florence Wilson or Wolsey, though in an English letter he writes himself Voluzene), a Scottish humanist of the first half of the 16th century, whose elegant Latinity, but still more the thoughtful beauty of his Christian philosophy, claims for him a high place among the scholars of his age. That he was born near Elgin, and studied philosophy at Aberdeen, as is stated in the notice of his life published in 1619 by Thomas Wilson in Adamsoni Poemata Sacra, may be only an inference (though probably a just one) from a passage in the dialogue De Tranquillilate Animi, more than half of which consists of a description of the abode of tranquillity, based on a dream that, as we are told, came to the author, when he had been a student of philosophy for four years, after a conversation on the pleasant banks of the Lossie with John Ogilvy, afterwards rector of Cruden. Proceeding to Paris, he became tutor to a nephew (or really a bastard son) of Cardinal Wolsey, and this connexion led to repeated visits to England, where he was well seen by the king, and formed, with men like John Fisher, Stephen Gardiner, and Thomas Cromwell, connexions that were not dissolved by Wolsey’s fall, for he was in England as late as 1534. In Paris he knew George Buchanan, who afterwards wrote a graceful epitaph on his friend’s death, and found patrons in the cardinals Jean de Lorraine (to whom he dedicated in 1531 a Latin exposition of Psalm XV.) and Jean du Bellay. With the latter he started in 1534 for Italy, but, being detained by sore sickness at Avignon, found a new patron in the bishop of the diocese, the learned and pious Sadolet, who procured for him the mastership of the school at Carpentras, with a salary of seventy crowns. Volusenus felt himself a little out ...