Chapter 11

THE SCHOLAR OF THE REFORMATION

The age of Mary Stewart is in many ways the climax of Scottish national history, as well as one of the most interesting and exciting chapters in the history of the world. The Stewarts of Scotland had been up to this point a native race entirely Scots in training as in birth, and bent above all things upon the progress and consolidation of their own ancient kingdom, the poor but proud; a speck all but lost in the distance of the seas, yet known all over Christendom wherever errant squires or chivalrous pretensions were known. But the new sovereign of Scotland was one whose heart and pride were elsewhere, whose favourite ambitions were directed beyond the limits of that ancient kingdom with which she had none of the associations of youth, and to which she came a stranger from another Court far more dazzling and splendid, with hopes and prospects incapable of being concentrated within the boundary of the Tweed. There is no indication that the much-contested history of Mary Stewart has lost any of its interest during the progress of the intermediate centuries; on the contrary, some of its questions are almost more hotly contested now than they were at the moment when they arose. Her chivalrous defenders are more bold than once they were, and though the tone of her assailants is subdued, it is from a natural softening of sentiment towards the past, and still more from the fashion of our time, which finds an absorbing interest in the manifestations of individual character and the discussion of individual motives, rather than from any change of opinion. I do not venture to enter into that long-continued conflict, or to attempt to decide for the hundredth time whether a woman so gifted and unfortunate was more or less guilty. Both parties have gone, and still go, too far in that discussion; and Mary would not have thanked (I imagine) those partisans who would prove her innocence at the cost of all those vigorous and splendid qualities which made her remarkable. She could scarcely be at once an unoffending victim and one of the ablest women of her time.

As this is the most interesting of all the epochs of Scottish history--and that not for Mary's sake alone, but for the wonderful conflict going on apart from her, and in which her tragic career is but an episode--so it is the most exciting and picturesque period in the records of Edinburgh, which was then in its fullest splendour of architectural beauty and social life; its noble streets more crowded, more gay, more tumultuous and tragical; its inhabitants more characteristic and individual; the scenes taking place within it more dramatic and exciting than at any other part of its history. Fine foreign ambassadors, grave English diplomates trained in the school of the great Cecil, and bound to the subtle and tortuous policy of the powerful Elizabeth; besides a new unusual crowd of lighter import but not less difficult governance, the foreign artists, musicians, courtiers of all kinds, who hung about the palace, had come in to add a hundred complicating interests and pursuits to the simpler if fiercer contentions of feudal lords and protesting citizens: not to speak of the greatest change of all, the substitution for the ambitious Churchman of old, with a coat of mail under his rochet, of the absolute and impracticable preacher who gave no dispensations or indulgences, and permitted no compromise. All these new elements, complicated by the tremendous question of the English succession, and the introduction of many problems of foreign politics into a crisis bristling with difficulties of its own, made the epoch extraordinary; while the very streets were continually filled by exciting spectacles, by processions, by sudden fights and deadly struggles, by pageants and splendours, one succeeding another, in which the whole population had their share. The decree of the town council that "lang weapons," spears, lances, and Jedburgh axes, should be provided in every shop--so that when the town bell rang every man might be ready to throw down his tools or his merchandise and grip the ready weapon--affords the most striking suggestion of those sudden tumults which might rise in a moment, and which were too common to demand any special record, but kept the town in perpetual agitation and excitement--an agitation, it is true, by no means peculiar to Edinburgh. No painter has ever done justice to the scene which must have been common as the day, when the beautiful young Queen, so little accustomed to the restraints and comparative poverty of her northern kingdom, and able to surround herself with the splendour she loved out of her French dowry, rode out in all her bravery up the Canongate, where every outside stair and high window would be crowded with spectators, and through the turreted and battlemented gate to the grim fortress on the crown of the hill, making everything splendid with the glitter of her cortege and her own smiles and unrivalled charm. Sadder spectacles that same beautiful Queen provided too--miserable journeys up and down from the unhappy palace, sometimes through a stern suppressed tumult of hostile faces, sometimes stealthily under cover of night which alone could protect her. Everything in Edinburgh is associated more or less with Mary's name. There is scarcely an old house existing, with any authentic traces of antiquity, in which she is not reported to have taken refuge in her trouble or visited in her pleasure. The more vulgar enthusiasts of the causeways are content to abolish all the other associations of old Edinburgh for Mary's name.

But I will not attempt to revive those pageants either of joy or sorrow. There are other recollections which may be evoked with less historical responsibility and at least a little more freshness and novelty. No figure can be introduced out of that age who has not some connection one way or other with the Queen; and the great scholar, whose reputation has remained unique in Scotland, had some share in her earlier and happier life, as well as a link, supposed of treachery, with her later career. George Buchanan was the Queen's reader and master in her studies when all was well with her. He is considered by some of her defenders to be the forger of the wonderful letters which, if true, are the most undeniable proof of her guilt. But these things were but incidents in his career, and he is in himself one of the most illustrious and memorable figures among the throngs that surrounded her in that brief period of sovereignty which has taken more hold of the imagination of Scotland, and indeed of the world, than many a longer and, in point of fact, more important reign.

It is difficult to understand how it is that in later days, and when established peace and tranquillity of living might have been supposed to give greater encouragement to study, accurate and fine scholarship should have ceased to be prized or cultivated in Scotland. Perhaps, however, the very advantages upon which we have plumed ourselves so long, the general diffusion of education and higher standard of knowledge, is one of the causes of this failure--not only the poverty of Scotch universities and want of endowments, but the broader and simpler scale on which our educational systems were founded, and which have made it more important to train men for the practical uses of teaching than permit to them the waywardness and independence of a scholar. These results show the "_défauts de nos qualités_," though we are not very willing to admit the fact. But in the earlier centuries no such reproach rested upon us. Although perhaps, then as now, the Scotch intelligence had a special leaning towards philosophy, there was still many a learned Scot whose reputation was in all the universities, whose Latinity was unexceptionable, and his erudition immense, and to whom verses were addressed and books dedicated in every centre of letters. One of the most distinguished of these scholars was George Buchanan, and there could be no better type of the man of letters of his time, in whom the liberality of the cosmopolitan was united with the exclusiveness of the member of a very strait and limited caste. He had his correspondents in all the cities of the Continent, and at home his closest associates were among the highest in his own land. Yet he was the son of a very poor man, born almost a peasant and dying nearly as poor as he was born. From wandering scholar and pedagogue he became the preceptor of a King and the associate of princes; but he was not less independent, and he was scarcely more rich in the one position than the other. His pride was not in the high consultations he shared or the national movements in which he had his part, but in his fine Latinity and the elegant turn of those classical lines which all his learned compeers admired and applauded. The part that he played in history has been made to look odious by skilled critics; and the great book in which he recorded the deeds of his contemporaries and predecessors has been assailed violently and bitterly as prejudiced, partial, and untrue. But nobody has been able to attack his Latin or impair the renown of his scholarship; and perhaps had he himself chosen the foundation on which to build his fame, this is what he would have preferred above all. History may come and politics go, and the principles of both may change with the generations, but Latin verse goes on for ever: no false ingenuity of criticism can pick holes in the deathless structure of an art with which living principles have had nothing to do for a thousand years and more.

Buchanan was born in a farmhouse, "a lowly cottage thatched with straw," in the year 1506, in Killearn in the county of Stirling; but not without gentle blood in his veins, the gentility so much prized in Scotland, which makes a traceable descent even from the roughest of country lairds a matter of distinction. His mother was a Heriot, and one wonders whether there might not be some connection between the great scholar and the worthy goldsmith of the next generation, who did so much for the boys of Edinburgh. Buchanan's best and most trustworthy biographer, Dr. Irving,[5] pictures to his readers the sturdy young rustic trudging two miles in all weathers to the parish school, with his "piece" in his pocket, and already the sonorous harmonies of the great classic tongues beginning to sound in his ears--a familiar picture which so many country lads born to a more modest fame have emulated. In the parish school of Killearn, in that ancient far-away Scotland before the Reformation, which it is hard to realise, so different must it have been from the characteristic Scotch school of all our traditions, the foundations of Buchanan's great scholarship and power were laid. His father died while he was still a mere child, and the future man of letters had plenty of rough rustic work, helping his mother about the farm on the holidays, which must have been more frequent while all the saints of the calendar were still honoured. Trees of his planting, his biographer says, writing in the beginning of this century, still grow upon the banks of the little stream which runs by the beautiful ruins of Dunblane, and which watered his mother's fields. When he had reached the age of fourteen an uncle Heriot seeing his aptitude for study sent him off, it would seem alone, in all his rusticity and homeliness, to Paris--a curious sign of the close connection between Scotland and France--where he carried on his studies or, a phrase more appropriate to his age, learned his lessons amid the throngs of the French schools. Before he was sixteen, however, his uncle died, leaving him desolate and unprovided for amongst strangers; and the boy had to make his way home as best he could, half begging, half working his passage, stopping perhaps here and there to help a schoolboy or to write a letter for the unlearned, and earning a bed and a meal as poor scholars were used to do. He remained a year in his mother's house, but probably was no longer wanted for the uses of the farm, since his next move was to the wars. He himself informs us in the sketch of his life which he wrote in his old age that he was "moved with a desire to study military matters," a desire by no means unusual at seventeen. These were the days when the fantastic French Albany was at the head of affairs in Scotland, during the childhood of James V, and the country was in great disorder, torn with private quarrels and dissensions. It is evident that, the kind uncle being dead and affairs in general so little propitious, there would be little chance in the resources of the farm of securing further university training for the boy who had his own way to make somehow in the world; and perhaps his experience of Paris and possession of the French language (no inconsiderable advantage when there were so many French adventurers and hangers on about the Court) might be expected to give him chances of promotion; while his service perhaps exempted an elder brother, of more use than he upon the farm, from needful service, when his feudal lord called out his men on the summons of the Regent.

[5] I must explain that this chapter was written before the publication of the recent, and I believe excellent, biography of Buchanan by Mr. P. Hume.

George Buchanan accordingly followed the Laird's flag upon one of the wildest and most fruitless of Albany's expeditions to the Border, for the siege of Wark. The great Border stronghold, the size and wonderful proportions of which astonished the Scots army, stands forth again, clear as when it first struck his boyish imagination, in the description which Buchanan gives of it nearly half a century later in his history of that time--where the reader can still see the discomfited army with its distracted captains and councils, and futile leader, straggling back through the deep snow, each gloomy band finding its way as best it could to its own district. Buchanan would seem to have had enough of fighting; and perhaps he had succeeded in proving to his relatives that neither arms nor agriculture were his vocation; for we next find him on his way to St. Andrews, "to hear John Major who was then teaching dialectics or rather sophistry." Here he would seem to have studied for two years; taking his degree in 1525 at the age of nineteen. After this he followed Major to France, whether for love of his master, or with the idea that Major's interest as a doctor of the Sorbonne might help him to find employment in Paris, we are not told. One of the many stories to his prejudice which were current in his after-career describes Buchanan as dependent on Major and ungrateful to him, repaying with a cruel epigram the kindness shown him. But there seems absolutely no foundation for this accusation which was probably suggested to after-detractors anxious for evidence that ingratitude, as one of them says, "was the great and unpardonable blemish of his life"--by the epigram in question, in which he distinguishes his professor as "solo cognomine Major." It might very well be, however, that Buchanan expected a kind recommendation from his St. Andrews master, such as the habit of the kindly Scots was apt to give, and some help perhaps in procuring employment, and that the failure of any aid of this description betrayed the youth into the national tendency to harshness of speech and the bitter jeer at one who was great only in his name.

A stranger with nothing but his learning and his Latin epigrams (though these last were a more marketable commodity then than now) would no doubt be forlorn enough, struggling to find himself standing-ground and a living, subsisting hardly on what chance employment might fall in his way, and reflecting, as most adventurers are apt to do, how easy it would be for his prosperous countryman to befriend him. Paris, always full of stir and commotion, had at this moment a new source of agitation in the rising force of the Reformation principles or, as Buchanan calls it, "the Lutheran controversy, which was already spreading far and wide," and into the midst of which he fell on his return. Whether his interest in the new creed did him harm in his search for an establishment we are not told: and probably the "struggle with adverse fortune for about two years" which he records was merely the difficulty in making himself known which affects every young man. At the end of that time he got an appointment in the College of St. Barbe as Professor of Grammar, and was henceforward exempted at least from the heart-sickening conflict with absolute poverty.

Buchanan would seem to have had already high ambitions and a certainty that he was fit for something better than the post of schoolmaster in a French college--for notwithstanding his eagerness to get this post we soon find him lamenting, in the abstract indeed, but in a manner too particular to be without special meaning, the small profit of intellectual labour and the weariness of a continual toil which was so little rewarded. His plaint of the long night's work, the burning of the midnight oil, the hunt through dusty and rotting manuscripts, seems touched with a tone of bitterness unusual in the student's murmurs over a lot which after all brings him as much pleasure as weariness. The ambitious lad was already, it is evident, longing for more brilliant scenes.

"Pervigil in lucem lecta atque relecta revolves Et putri excuties scripta sepulta situ: Sæpe caput scalpes, et vivos roseris ungues, Irata feries pulpita sæpe manu."

At St. Barbe, however, he secured a noble young pupil of his own country, the future Earl of Cassilis, who opened to him a brighter way, and finally led him back to his own country and for a time to higher fortune. When young King James came to Paris to meet Magdalen of France--with the sudden pathetic result of a hasty romantic marriage soon followed by the poor young lady's death--young Cassilis was still there with his tutor, who was himself but little advanced in life beyond his patron. And it was presumably in the train of the royal pair that the young men returned home. In that case Buchanan must have witnessed the touching scene that took place at the poor young Queen's disembarkation when she kissed the soil of her new country, the land which was to afford her only a grave. Whether dreams of Court favour and advancement were beginning to germinate in the young scholar's brain as he was thus suddenly swept into the train of royalty there is nothing to say; but at all events he observed everything with keen attentive eyes, unconsciously collecting the best materials for the history he was yet to write. And it is clear that this accidental connection with the King bore after-fruit. Buchanan went to Ayrshire with his young patron who had come of age, and whose studies were over it is to be supposed: and in the leisure of that relaxation from former duties amused himself with compositions of various sorts, and in particular with the _Somnium_, a lively poetical satire upon the Franciscans. The monks, who had been the favourite butt of all the ages, were more than ever open to the assaults of the wits now that the general sentiment had turned so strongly against them, and Buchanan said no more than Dunbar with full permission, before any controversy arose, had said, nor half so much as David Lindsay was privileged to say. And Lord Cassilis' tutor had all the freedom of a private individual responsible to no one while he lingered at his young patron's castle, pleased to make as many as comprehended his Latin laugh, though probably there were few capable of appreciating its classical beauty. This, however, was but a pastime, and his mind again began to turn towards Paris, where alone perhaps there was to be found the kind of work for which he was most fit and the literary applause and emulation which were dear to his soul.

He was about to set out when the King, who doubtless had owed some entertainment to Buchanan on the lingering homeward journey, and who must have been well aware of his character and gifts, made him pause by offering him the tutorship of his illegitimate son, one among several for whom James, so young as he was, not more than twenty-five, was already responsible, another James Stewart, though not the notable James who was afterwards the Regent Murray. This appointment brought Buchanan at once within the charmed circle of the Court, and probably prepared the way for all his after-honours. But his career in Edinburgh at this moment was not especially glorious. Delighted by the _Somnium_, which had been read to him and applauded by all the obsequious audience round, James, who though a good Catholic liked a clever assault upon the priests as much as any one, recommended the new member of his household to resume the subject. It is supposed that the Grey Friars from their great lodgment so near the Court had found fault with the appointment of Buchanan and assailed himself as a profane and scoffing heretic. It was certainly strange that a man who had adopted the heresies of Luther should be appointed to the care of the son of a Catholic King, but Buchanan it is probable kept his religious opinions to himself, and it was not necessary to be a Protestant to give vent to the broadest satires against the monks and friars who had been for so long the least defensible portion of the Catholic establishment. Buchanan, however, was not bold enough to fall upon his enemies as Sir David Lindsay did. A poor man and a dependant, had he the highest spirit in the world, must still bear traces of the yoke to which circumstances have accustomed him, and a scholar is not necessarily brave. He shrank from encountering the great and powerful community of the Grey Friars in the eye of day, and instead of the lively assault expected from him, temporised and wrote something which was neither satisfactory to the King who wanted a laugh at the expense of the monks, nor to the monks who were more enraged by the covert character of a satire which could be read both ways, than they would have been by straightforward abuse. The dissatisfaction of James moved Buchanan to bolder measures, and after his halfhearted attempt to compromise himself as little as possible, he was goaded into the most virulent use of his pen, and cut down his adversaries with the sharp shafts of his _Franciscanus_ with a vigour and malice which left nothing to be desired. The Court had its laugh which was resounding and long, but neither King nor courtiers had any penalty to pay for the pranks which the classical Samson wrought for their pleasure.

Though they were thus mocked in high places, the Churchmen, however, had lost none of their power, and even the protection of the royal household did not avail the audacious poet. In the raid upon heretics which was made in the beginning of the year 1539 Buchanan's name was included among the guilty. He himself tells us that "Cardinal Beatoun bought his life from the King with money": making it probably the price of some concession that this audacious assailant should be delivered into the hands of the Church. At all events the terrified scholar had no confidence in the power or will of his Sovereign to protect him, and, scared by the flames of various burnings which had taken place throughout the kingdom, directed his best wits to finding a way of safety. He escaped through a window while his keepers were asleep, some say from the Castle of St. Andrews, some from that of Edinburgh. His own account is more simple and goes into no detail. "He made his way into England, eluding the guards set for him." But England was not more secure than Scotland. The quick-witted fugitive found Henry VIII impartially burning victims from both sides, on the same day at the same stake, and considered this sublime indifference as still more dangerous than the strife of Scotch affairs. "His old familiarity with the French, and the singular hospitality of that nation," led him back to the city which was then the favourite resort of all the Muses. When, however, Buchanan arrived in Paris he found that his special enemy, Cardinal Beatoun, had preceded him there as ambassador from King James, and, alarmed by so dangerous a vicinity, he accepted at once an offer made to him by Andrew Govra, one of his colleagues of former times, who had been appointed to the charge of a college in Bordeaux, and removed thither with the greatest expedition before his foe could be made aware of his presence in Paris.

This was in the end of the year 1539, when Buchanan had attained the age of thirty-three. His residence in the capital of the famous province of Gascony seems to have been active and happy. He was Professor of Latin in the college; perhaps the terms would be more just if we said he was Latin master in one of the most flourishing and successful of French schools; but our neighbours still prefer the more high-sounding nomenclature. The great Garonne was not full of ships and trade at that period as it is now; but Bordeaux was one of the old capital cities of France, possessing a rank which now belongs to no French provincial town, and had its own characteristic society, its scholars and provincial statesmen. But the most important and notable human being of all whom Buchanan found in his new sphere was a certain small seigneur of Gascony, six years old, and already an accomplished Latinist, having learned no other language from his cradle, bearing the name of Michel de Montaigne and already a little philosopher as well as scholar. The great essayist speaks afterwards of "George Buchanan, the celebrated Scotch poet," as one of his masters, but he does not say whether Buchanan was the enlightened pedagogue who connived at his endless reading and let him off as much as was possible from other less congenial studies.

Buchanan, however, must have found the cheerful southern city, with its Parliament and its colleges, and all the teeming life and restless energies of the Gascon race, not unlike a kind of warmer and more brilliant Scotland, full of national brag and gallantry, a congenial sphere. He had been for a long time shedding complimentary verses, sonnets, dedications, about him after the manner of the time, serving out to everybody who was kind to him a little immortality in the shape of classic thanks or compliment: but in Bordeaux he began to produce works of more apparent importance, "four tragedies" intended primarily for the use of his college, where it was the custom to represent yearly a play, generally of an allegorical character--one of the fantastical miracle plays which delighted the time, and which were often as profane in reality as they were religious in pretence. The great classicist considered his boys to be wasting their faculties in representing such inferior performances, but humoured the prevailing taste so much as to choose two Scriptural subjects, Jephthah and John the Baptist, alternately with the Medea and Alcestis. He "was successful beyond his hopes," he says, in these efforts. In all of the plays the little Montaigne was one of the chief performers. "Before a fit age, _Alter ab undecimo tum me vix ceperat annus_," says that great writer, "I sustained the first parts in the Latin tragedies of Buchanan, which were played in our College de Guienne, with dignity." The little scene is pleasant to think of, not too long out of date to recall the scholastic pastimes of to-day, though there is no Buchanan to produce plays for Eton or Harrow, and probably no young Montaigne to play the hero. The learned Scot, with his peasant breeding no doubt making him still more conscious of the strain of gentle blood in his veins, a little rough, irascible, and impatient in nature, notwithstanding the elegance of his Latin speech, and the little noble, gentilhomme to his fingers' end, half respectful, half contemptuous of the pedagogue, make a picturesque contrast.

Buchanan, however, did not feel himself safe even in Bordeaux, where he remained only three years. It is said that Cardinal Beatoun wrote to the Archbishop recommending his arrest, and the Franciscan community in the Gascon city, which had heard from their brethren of his offences against the Order, kept an unfriendly eye upon him, ready to take advantage of any hostile opportunity. He therefore returned to Paris, where in a similar but apparently more obscure position he spent some years. In 1547 he was very glad to accompany Govra, who had brought him to Bordeaux, and whom Montaigne describes as "beyond comparison the greatest Principal in France," to his native country Portugal, whither his King had summoned him in order that his talents might be of use to his own nation as the head of the new University of Coimbra. It would seem that Govra carried his whole staff along with him to Portugal. "Most of them," Buchanan says, "were men bound to him (Buchanan) for many years in the ties of closest friendship, men who were renowned for their works all over the world," and in whose society the Scottish scholar felt that he would be not among strangers but among kinsmen and friends. A still stronger inducement was, that while all Europe was ablaze with wars and religious controversies, that one little kingdom was at peace. The band of scholars thus removed together to their new sphere, like a hive of bees, and at first all went well with them; but they had not been long in Portugal when Govra died, leaving them without any powerful patronage or protection, a band of strangers, no doubt appearing in the aspect of supplanters of native talent to many hostile lookers-on. Men of their pursuits and modes of thought, aliens in an unknown country, perhaps sufficiently free of speech to alarm the narrow-minded, no great observers of ritual or ceremony, were too likely under any circumstances to attract the notice of the Inquisition in a place so wholly given over to its sway.

Buchanan was probably the most distinguished among this band of scholars; and a vague report that he had written something against the Franciscans attached to him a special prejudice. As nobody knew what this work was, it could not be brought formally against him, but lesser crimes were found, such as that of eating meat in Lent and speaking disrespectfully of monks, sins which even in Portugal most people were more or less guilty of. Buchanan, however, had no very dreadful penalty to bear. He was imprisoned for some months in a monastery, that he might be brought by the monks' instruction to a better way of thinking. The prisoner was fair enough to admit that he found his jailors by no means bad men or unkindly in their treatment of him--an acknowledgment which is greatly to his credit, since prejudice was equally strong on both sides and a persecuted scholar was as little apt to see the good qualities of his persecutors as they were to accept his satires. It would be interesting to know what the homely fathers thought of him, this dreadful freethinker and satirist committed to their care for instruction. He found them "entirely ignorant of religious questions," though evidently so much less hostile than he had expected, and occupied his enforced leisure in making his translation of the Psalms, a monument of elegant verse and fine Latinity, for which the quiet of the convent and the absence of interruptions must have been most favourable. He would seem to have corrected the bad impression he had at first made, by these devout studies and his behaviour generally; for when he was released the King would not let him go, but gave him a daily allowance for his expenses until some fit position could be found for him. But there was evidently nothing in Lisbon which tempted Buchanan to stay. He languished in the little capital separated from all congenial society, and sighed for his beloved Paris which he addressed as his mistress, writing a poem, _Desiderium Lutetiæ_, in praise of and longing for the presence of that nymph whom so many have wooed.

At last he contrived to escape in a ship bound for England, which, however, he found as little congenial as Portugal, and with as short a delay as possible he returned to that Lutetia which he loved. Arrived there, he would seem to have resumed his old work as schoolmaster in one of the colleges, no way advanced, despite his fame and adventures, from the first post he had held when little more than a boy, though he was now between forty and fifty, and one of the best-known scholars of his time. A few years later he became a member of the household of the Maréchal de Brissac as tutor to his son, and with him spent five years, partly in Italy in the province of Liguria where the Maréchal was governor. For the first time he would seem to have been treated with honour, and his advice taken in affairs of state and public business generally, and here he tells us he devoted much of his time to the study of sacred literature, so that he might be able to form a matured judgment as to the controversies which were tearing the world asunder. In the year 1560, his services being no longer required by his pupil, Buchanan at last decided upon returning to his native country. "The despotism of the Guises," he says, "was over, and the religious excitement had begun to calm down." It would appear that though his convictions had so long been on the side of the Reform, he had not yet publicly made himself known as a member of that party. And his return to Scotland was made with the full intention so to do.

Such was the wandering and uncertain career of the scholar and man of letters of the sixteenth century. Perhaps Buchanan's temper was less compliant, his character less easily adaptable to the society in which he found himself, than most; but it may be doubted whether this was the cause of the very small advancement in life to which he had come, since he was complaisant enough to indite many fine verses in praise of people who gave him a banquet or a shelter, and he seems to have gone nowhere without making friends. He had got abundant reputation, however, if not much else, and was known wherever he went as the celebrated poet, which doubtless was agreeable to him if not very profitable. But it gives us a certain insight into the life of the literary class in his time to see so notable a man wandering from one place to another, professor or regent or private tutor as it happened, never well off, never secure, often in the position of a dependant. When Milton speaks of the "others," poets whom he thus adopts into a kind of equality, who "use"

"To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, Or with the tangles of Neæra's hair,"

it is supposed to be Buchanan whom he refers to, which is perhaps honour enough for a modern classicist; though Amaryllis, the critics say, was no more individual a love than the Lutetia before mentioned, for whom he pined. Yet though all the scholars of his time admired and followed him, he had to return again and again to his Latin grammar, and to small boys not so wonderful as Michel of Montaigne; and when he returned to Edinburgh at the age of fifty-five his worldly position was scarcely better than when he got his first appointment at twenty-one to the College of St. Barbe. His life was now, however, to take another form.

Buchanan's return to Scotland "after the despotism of the Guises was over" corresponded very nearly with the return of Queen Mary. It is surmised that he may have travelled in the suite of "the Lord James," the future Earl of Murray, who paid his sister a visit very soon after the death of her husband, King Francis: certainly nothing could be more probable than that the Scotch scholar, seeking an opportunity to return to his native country, should have joined himself to the train of the prince, who probably had been acquainted in his childhood with his brother's tutor, and who was himself a man of education and a patron of literature. If this guess should be correct it would account for Buchanan's rapid promotion to Court favour. Edinburgh was in a state of happy expectation when the poet came back. What was virtually a new reign, though Mary had been the nominal possessor of the throne from her birth, was about to begin; the fame of the young Queen had no doubt been blown far and wide about the country on every breeze--that fame of beauty, sweetness, and grace which is the most universally attractive of all reputations, and which made the proud Scots prouder still in the possession of such a prodigy. That there were graver thoughts among the very serious and important party, who felt the safety of their newly-established and severely-reformed Church to be in doubt if not in danger, and who hated and feared "the mass" and the priests who performed it as they did the devil (with whom indeed they were more amiably familiar), does not alter the fact that the anticipation of Mary's return was a happy one, and her welcome cordial and without drawback. Nobody knew that there had been a project of a landing at Aberdeen, where Huntly and the other northern lords had proposed to meet her with twenty thousand men, thus enabling her to march upon her capital as a conquering heroine of the old faith, putting Satan, in the shape of John Knox, under her feet. Had she accepted this proposal how strangely might the face of history have been changed! But there is no reason to suppose that Mary desired to come to Scotland with fire and flame, any more than there is that her destruction was a foregone conclusion. She came with many prognostics of success, though also with a continual possibility that "terrible tragedies" might come of it; and for some time it would appear that her Court was as seemly and pleasant as any Court could be, full of youthful pleasure and delight as became her years and the gay youthful company that surrounded her, but also of graver matters and thoughts and purposes becoming a noble Queen.

The first notice we have of Buchanan after his return to Scotland is conveyed in a letter from Randolph, the English envoy in Edinburgh, in which the question, "Who is fittest to be sent from this Queen to attende upon the Queen's Majesty (Elizabeth) for the better continuance of intelligence with her Highness?" is discussed. "Of any that I know," says the representative of England, "David Forrest is likeliest, and most desireth it. There is with the Queen one called Mr. George Buchanan, a Scottishe man very well learned that was schollemaster unto Monsieur de Brissac's son, very godly and honest, whom I have always judged fitter than any other I know." This was written in January 1562, and shows that Buchanan was at that time about the Court and in the way of employment, though he was not then chosen as confidential messenger between the two queens. A little later he is visible in the exercise of his old vocation as the tutor of Mary herself. "The Queen readeth daily after her dinner," says the same careful narrator, "instructed by a learned man, Mr. George Buchanan, somewhat of Lyvie." These few words set before us a curious scene. Mary at the height of her good resolutions and good beginning, keeping up her literature as well as all her pleasures, her hunting, her riding, her music, her embroideries, all the accomplishments of her royal training--makes a delightful picture. She had the habit of working with her needle like any innocent lady in her bower, while the lords of her Council, grim lords whom it is strange to associate with this pretty pose of royal simplicity, discussed around her the troublous affairs of the most turbulent kingdom in Christendom: and after her dinner, in the languor of the afternoon, one wonders if the lovely lady was diligent over her Livy or rather seduced her preceptor to talk about Paris, that much-desired Lutetia which he had so longed for, as no doubt in the bottom of her heart she too was sometimes doing. The two so unlike each other--the beautiful young princess not quite twenty, the old scholar and schoolmaster though a poet withal, drawing near the extreme boundaries of middle age, and worn with much struggling against the world and poverty--would yet find a subject and mutual interest far apart from the book, which made endless conversation possible, and many a pleasant comparison of experiences so different. Buchanan had dedicated a book to one of those fair and famous Margarets who adorned Paris at that epoch, and presumably knew her or something of her state, and could understand her Majesty of Scotland's allusions, and knew something of the gossip of the Court, or at least could pretend to do so, as a man who was aware what was expected of a courtier. It is possible indeed that Mary was truly studious, and liked her Livy as her contemporary did, the gentle Lady Jane who had so sad a fate; but it is much more likely, we think, that the big volume lay open, while the scholar's eyes glowed and shone with cherished reminiscences of that enchanting city in which his best days had flown, and Mary Stewart responded to his recollections with all her gay wit and charm of pleasant speech. Many are the tragic associations of Holyrood: it is well to note that other companions more sober than Signor Davie, more calm than Chastelar, shared now and then the Queen's leisure. Grave commentators conclude that it spoke well for her Majesty's Latinity that Buchanan put her on Livy; for my part I have no doubt that these two unlikely gossips, after perhaps a sentence or two, forgot about Livy, and talked of their Paris all the time.

Buchanan took the opportunity of this quiet and prosperous period, when all was hopeful in the nation as well as in his own prospects, to publish the poetical version of the Psalms which had occupied his enforced leisure in the Portuguese monastery years before. They had not yet seen the light in a complete form, although several of them had been included by the well-known printer Etienne, or Stephanus as he is more generally called, in a collection of similar translations by several learned hands, among which he gives in a flattering preface by far the highest place to Buchanan. The terms of laudation in which he speaks, and which it was the fashion of the time to employ, may be judged from the following extracts quoted by Irving. After commenting upon the general excellence of his friend's work, superior to all others, he adds,--

"There is nothing more honourable, nothing more splendid, than after excelling all others, at length to excel one's self; so in my judgment you have most happily attained to this praise in your version of these psalms. For in translating the other odes of this sacred poet, you have been Buchanan, that is, you have been as conspicuous among the other paraphrasists as the moon among the smaller luminaries; but when you come to the hundred and fourth psalm you surpass Buchanan; so that you do not now shine like the moon among the lesser luminaries but like the sun you seem to obscure all the stars by your brilliant rays."

The community of letters in these days was in the habit of expressing the intensest mutual admiration, except when a contrary feeling not less strong animated their minds and pens. Buchanan dedicated his psalms to his beautiful pupil and patron in terms as highflown but more elegant, and with a justifiable wealth of hyperbolical adulation. It would be an undue demand upon humanity to require nothing more than plain fact in a poetical address to a young Sovereign so gracious, so accomplished, and so fair. And yet in the extraordinary circumstances, so soon to be swallowed up in the abyss of a catastrophe still more extraordinary, there is little extravagance in Buchanan's address, of which we shall attempt a translation though most unworthy.

"Lady, who bears the sceptre of this land By endless forefathers transmitted down, Whose worth exceeds thy fortune far, as stand Thy virtues o'er thy years, and the renown Of noble gifts over thy noble line, And spirit o'er thy sex:--without a frown Accept in this poor Latin garb of mine The noble songs of Israel's prophet king. Far from Parnassus and the classic shore, From under northern stars my gift I bring; Nor had I ventured such an ill-born thing To lay before thee, but for fearing more To miss the little chance of pleasing thee, Whose understanding gives a merit not in me."

Buchanan followed this publication by various others, and strangely enough, while still enjoying the royal favour brought out his _Franciscanus_, his _Fratres Fraterrimi_, and other satires specially directed against the monks: which, however, seem to have done him no harm, for he talks in 1567 of "the occupations of a court," which kept him from bestowing the time and trouble he wished on the preparation of his various books for the press. Whether the readings from Livy went on all this time we have no record; but when Queen Mary married Darnley, and when her son was born, Buchanan would still seem to have occupied the position of Court poet, and celebrated both events by copies of verses as flattering, as well as elegant, as the dedication. From the first of these we may quote the lines in which Buchanan proves, notwithstanding his long absence and cosmopolitan training, that the native brag of the Scot was as strong in him as if he had never left his native shores. It could scarcely be to flatter either of the bridal pair that he burst forth into this celebration of "the ancient Kingdom."

"For herein lies the glory of the Scot, To fill the woods with clamour of the chase; To swim the stream, and cold and heat defy, And hunger and fatigue. To guard their land Not with deep trench or wall, but with the force Of arms, contemning life for honour's sake; To keep their troth, to reverence the bonds Of friendship, to love virtue and not gifts. Such acts as these secured throughout the land Freedom and peace, when war raged o'er the world, And every other nation was constrained To change its native laws for foreign yoke, The fury of the Goth stopped here; the onslaught fierce Of the strong Saxon, and the tribes more strong, The Dane and Norman, who had conquered him, Nay, in our ancient annals live the tales Of Roman victory stayed--the Latin tide Which neither south wind checked, nor Parthia bleak, Nor waves of Meroi, nor the rushing Rhine, Was here arrested by this only race Before whose face the Roman paused and held The frontier of his empire, not by lines Of hill and river, but by walls and towns, By Caledonian axes oft assailed, Laying all hope of further gain aside."

In the meantime, while these poetical performances went on, and the scholar occupied his leisure in preparing for publication his scattered works--an occupation which of itself proved the quiet and good hope in which he was living--more serious labours also occupied his mind. Notwithstanding his tutorship at Court, Buchanan took advantage of the moment to declare himself an adherent of the newly formed and very belligerent Church, now settled and accepted on the basis of the Reformation, but with little favour at Court as has been seen. He not only put himself and his erudition at once on that side in the most open and public way, but sat in the General Assembly, or at least in one of the Assemblies which preceded the formal creation of that great ecclesiastical parliament, in 1563, less than two years after his arrival in Scotland. Nor was his position that of a simple member taking part in the debates; he seems to have sat upon various special committees, and to have been entrusted, along with several others, to revise the Book of Discipline, the standard of order and governance: and this while he was still a courtier, Mary's tutor and gossip, holding his place in her presence, and celebrating the events of the time in courtly and scholarly verse--a curious instance of toleration in a time which scarcely knew its name.

To recompense Buchanan's services Queen Mary granted him, in the year 1564, an allowance from the forfeited Church property, making him pensioner of the Abbey of Crossraguel, with an income of five hundred pounds Scots--a sum very different, it need not be said, from the same sum in English money. The abbey had been held by a Kennedy, the brother of Buchanan's first pupil, the Earl of Cassilis, and very probably he had thus some knowledge of and connection with the locality, where he had gone with Cassilis many years before. The grant would seem for some years to have profited him little, the then Earl of Cassilis, son of his gentler Gilbert, having little inclination to let go his hold of the rents which his uncle had drawn, either in favour of a new abbot or of the pensioner; and the cruelties with which this fierce Ayrshire lord treated the functionary who succeeded his uncle seem incredible to hear of. George Buchanan kept out of his clutches; but it was not till some years afterwards that we find the local tyrant bound over in sureties to leave the two lawful proprietors of these funds alone. So far as can be made out, Mary's grant to Buchanan was almost identical in date with the publication of the Psalms and the sonnet which he placed at their head: a graceful and royal return for the compliment, quite in harmony with the customs of the time. Both events occurred, as would appear, in the year 1564, when all was still well with the unfortunate Queen.

Buchanan has been accused of great ingratitude to Mary, because at one time he served and flattered her, and received as a recompense for the incense he offered, a substantial benefit: but afterwards turned from her party to that of her brother, and condemned her with unsparing blame in his History, as well as acted against her after her downfall. But the ingratitude is quite incapable of proof. To be devoted to a royal personage in his or her youth, and to maintain unbroken, however he or she may change, this early devotion through evil and through good report, is a romantic grace which is given to few. It was given to very few of those who received with enthusiasm the young Queen of Scotland, when she came unsullied, with all her natural fascination and charm, into the country which hoped everything from her, yet knew nothing of her. After the half-dozen years of disaster and tragedy, of which a much greater number of her people believed her the guilty cause than the innocent victim, there were few indeed who maintained their faith. And Buchanan was neither romantic nor young; he had none of the elements of an enthusiast in him. A caustic man of the world, a self-absorbed scholar without domestic ties or usage in the art of loving, it would have been wonderful indeed had he constituted himself the champion of his beautiful pupil in her terrible adversity because she had shown him a little favour and he had laid poetical homages at her feet in a brighter time. It would be hard indeed if such a passage of mutual good offices were to bind a man's judgment for ever, and prevent him from exercising the right of choosing whom he will serve to all time. Mary's bounty would suffice to give to her tutor the independence which he had struggled for all his life, if it had been paid; but it was not paid for several years; and it was a bounty which cost the giver nothing, so that the claim for eternal gratitude is overweening in any case.

At the same time, both then and ever, Buchanan's patron and backer was the Lord James, a man with whom he was very much more likely to find himself in sympathy than with the young Queen. A grave temper and some learning, and also the charm of early association, would naturally attract the elderly scholar more than Mary's feminine gifts, however great their charm. It was Murray, no doubt, who presented him to the Queen, and procured him his position at Court; and just as the tragic moment approached, when Mary's brilliant life was about to plunge into darkness, Murray bestowed on Buchanan the place of all others best suited for him, and to which his whole previous existence tended--that of Principal of the College of St. Leonard's in the University of St. Andrews. A more fit position, as the best field for his great gifts and dignified retirement for his old age, could not be imagined. Buchanan was sixty; he was of all the scholars of his time _facile princeps_, according to the opinion of the great French printer and scholar, whose expressions were adopted in the register of the University as describing the qualifications of the new Principal. It might well have been supposed that in the reconstitution and improvement of that old University, in the supervision of his students, in the periodical visit to Edinburgh for Church matters or educational duties, which has afforded the necessary relaxation to many a succeeding principal, the peaceful days of the greatest scholar in Europe would now have passed tranquilly, until he found his resting-place, like so many others, under the soft green mantle of the turf which, broken only by solemn mounds--the last traces of individuality--encircled the great Cathedral of St. Andrews as it now encircles the ruins of that once splendid shrine.

The events of the time, however, permitted no such dignified and calm conclusion. One can imagine the horror and dismay with which the little community at St. Andrews heard the dreadful news, carried far and wide on every breeze, with every kind of whispered comment and suggestion--soon to be no longer whispered with pale face and bated breath, but proclaimed from the housetops--of Darnley's murder. Buchanan had poured forth his celebrations of Mary's marriage and of the birth of the heir while still a member of her household. And no doubt he had become aware of the dissensions in that royal house, of Darnley's ingratitude and folly and the Queen's impatience, before he escaped from all the talk and endless gossip to the quiet of his college. But it would seem equally clear that when the action of the sombre tragedy quickened he was absent from the scene and knew of it only by the rumours and reports that came across the Firth. First Rizzio's murder, which the distant spectators would discuss, no doubt, with a thrill not entirely of horror, a stern sense that justice had been done, a satisfied prejudice--and no doubt some patriotic, if still prejudiced, hope that now the Italian was removed there would be less of foreign policy, and a more entire regard for the welfare of affairs at home. Then would come the rumours of the Queen's vengeance, lightly held at first, of Bothwell always in the foreground, her chief supporter and partisan--Bothwell who, though loved by nobody, was yet a Protestant, and therefore not altogether beyond hope. And then with ever-quickening haste event after event--the murder of the King, for whom no one would have mourned much had it been attended by circumstances less terrible; the mad proceedings of the Queen, whether constrained or free, her captivity, outrage, or conspiracy, whichever it was, her insane and incomprehensible marriage, which no force or persuasion could account for. As the posts arrived at uncertain intervals, delayed by weather, strong winds and heavy seas, by breaking down of conveyances, by the very agitations and tumults in the capital which made them so terribly interesting, the eager spectators in Fife must have congregated to await their arrival with an intensity of excitement, of which, with our endless sources of information and constant communication, we can form little idea now.

And there would seem to be no doubt of the strong immediate feeling which arose against the Queen, the instant conclusion of the bystanders as to her guilt. There have been no greater fluctuations in historical opinion than those that have arisen around the facts of Mary's life. Historians of the eighteenth century considered it as a test of a man's moral sanity whether he persisted in believing in Mary's innocence or not. Among her contemporaries the progress of time which softened impression, and the many pathetic situations of her later history, the terrible misfortunes under which she fell, her endless miseries and troubles, and the brave spirit with which she met them, turned some hearts again towards her, an ever-troubled but ever-devoted body of partisans. But at the moment when these terrible events occurred there can be little doubt that the horror and condemnation were almost unanimous. No reasoning could explain away those wild and mad acts, no discussion of probability come in. The mob in Edinburgh which raged against her was checked in its fierceness and subdued to pity at sight of the wretched lady in her despair, at that awful moment when she appeared at the window of the Provost's lodging in the High Street, and made her wild appeal, in all the force of impassioned and terrible emotion, to the overawed and excited crowd. They saw her in the carelessness of misery half-dressed, unadorned, disenchanted, and delivered from the maddening delusion which had carried her away, recognising in its full extent the horrors of the result--and their hearts were rent with pity. But notwithstanding that pity and all the innate chivalry which her sufferings called forth, Edinburgh and Scotland, the whole alarmed and terrified nation, believed at first the evidence of their senses. There seems nothing more distinct than this fact throughout all the trouble and tumult of the moment. It is not to be taken as an absolute proof of Mary's guilt. Such impressions have existed in other though less conspicuous cases and have been proved untrue. But that it did exist universally there can be little doubt.

The scene at the window of the Provost's lodging where the unfortunate Queen was lodged, near the Nether Bow of Edinburgh, when brought back from Dunbar after the flight of Bothwell by the angry lords, with the mob clamouring underneath, and her enemies holding her fate in their hands, seems to me one of the most significant in her history. No woman was ever in circumstances more terrible. The situation is stronger if we suppose her guilt, and that what we see before us is a great spirit carried away by passion--that something beyond reason, beyond all human power to restrain, which sometimes binds an angelic woman to a villain, and sometimes a man of the highest power and wisdom to a lovely trifler or a fool. It seems to me as at once more consistent with the facts and with human nature to realise the position of the unhappy Queen as transported by that overwhelming sentiment, and wrought on the other side to an impatience almost maddening, by the injuries, follies, treacheries, and universal provocation of her unworthy husband, until the force of the bewildering current carried her in a disastrous moment over a precipice worse than any Niagara, in a headlong course of mingled misery, exasperation, love, and despair. Before she had even accomplished the terrible circle of events, and become Bothwell's wife, it requires no strong effort of the imagination to perceive that the despair might well have come uppermost, and that Mary fully recognised, not only the horror, but the futility and wretched failure into which she had plunged. We do not pretend to believe that there was much to cause remorse in the mind of such a woman in such an age in the death, however brought about, of the miserable Darnley. Mary could have brushed him from her memory like a fly, had that been all. But the rage of despair and failure was in her soul when she raved like a caged lion from door to window, imprisoned, trapped, and betrayed, expressing her incoherent transport of pain to the mob which would have had her blood, but which, overcome by the spectacle of that supreme and awful passion, became silent with awe or hushed by a spasm of pity and tears.

So it has remained, a spectacle to all the earth, which the fiercest assailant and the most rigid judge cannot long contemplate without yielding to a painful compassion which rends the heart. Why should all that faculty and force, all that wonderful being, with every capacity for happiness and making happy, for wise action and beneficent dealing, for boundless influence and power--why such youth, such strength, such spirit, equal to every enterprise, should they have been swept away by that remorseless fate? We can still see the trapped and ruined Queen--exasperated still further by the consciousness that many of the men now holding her in bonds were at least as guilty as she, guilty of Darnley's blood, guilty if not of favouring yet of fearing Bothwell and yielding their countenance to his plans--pacing that chamber, appearing at that window, her loveliness, her adornments, and all the wiles of triumphant beauty forgotten, throwing forth to the earth that was as brass and the skies that were as iron, like a wild animal in its torment, her hoarse inarticulate cry. And, whatever we may think of her merits, that terrible spectacle is more than flesh and blood can bear. Pity takes the place of wrath and indignation that she alone should suffer: why not Lethington, Huntly, Athole, and the rest, all those stern peers who counselled with her upon the most effectual way of having Darnley removed, the thankless fool who disturbed every man's peace--why were not they tried along with her, they who took such high ground as her judges? Why should she bear the brunt of all? Even Bothwell had escaped, and Mary stood at the bar of the world alone.

But such thoughts would not seem to have moved the first spectators, to whom all that damning sequence of events, one precipitated on the heels of another, came fresh as they occurred day by day. As for Buchanan, he would be less prone to doubt than any. He knew something of the Court of France and of the atmosphere in which Mary had received her training. He was acquainted with many a royal scandal, and had much experience of a world in which vice was the rule and good behaviour a mere exception, due to a cold temperament, or a wariness uncongenial to generous youth. Such an old man of the world is slow to believe in innocence at all, and it is very likely that to him who knew her so well it was impossible to conceive of Mary as an example of weak but spotless virtue. The Principal of St. Leonard's went over to Edinburgh a few days after the completion of that tragic chapter, when Mary had been consigned to Lochleven, and Murray had assumed the Regency. The city was still agitated by much discussion of the dreadful questions which occupied all minds yet was slowly calming down like an angry sea, with long seethings and swellings of excitement. The object of Buchanan's visit was not curiosity or desire to be in the centre of that excitement, but a simpler matter, which has drawn many a Principal of St. Andrews since to the capital of Scotland, an Assembly of the Church, which opened "in the Nether Tolbooth" on the 25th of June. Of this Assembly he, though a layman, was appointed Moderator "for eschewing of confusion in reasoning"--a curious motive, which proves at least that his contemporaries had great confidence in his judgment, and also that the passion of this excited and tumultuous time ran so high in the Church that a stronger authority than usual was wanted to keep it within bounds. The sentiment of the Church, or at least of the dominant party in it, would seem to have been rather satisfaction that the Sovereign, foreign alike in training and religion, had been set aside than any distress at the cause. The Assembly congratulates itself that "this present has offered some better occasion than in times bygane, and has begun to tread down Satan under foot," which is not a very amiable deliverance: but kindness and charity were not the Christian virtues most approved in those days.

From this time Buchanan took up with vehemence, and indeed with violence, the prosecution of Mary, acting often as her accuser, and always as an active agent, secretary, or commissioner, in the conduct of the indictment against her. He has been subject on this account to very hard treatment especially from the recent defenders of the Queen. Mr. Hosack, in his able book _Mary Queen of Scots and her Accusers_, denounces him as having offered verses and adulations to the Queen at a time when, according to his own after-statement, everybody knew her to be living in shameless vice and corruption. This, however, is not at all a necessary inference. It might, on the contrary, very well have lent bitterness to Buchanan's historical record, written after the dreadful catastrophe which so many accepted as a revelation of Mary's real character, that he had himself been one of the deceived, who for years had entertained no suspicion, but accepted the fair seeming as truth. Such a sentiment is one of the most common in human nature. The friend deceived becomes the bitterest enemy; and he who has been seduced into undeserved approval is apt to go farther than the fiercest adversary when he learns that his own utterances have helped to veil the crime which he had never suspected the existence of. This motive is enough, we think, to account for the special virulence with which Buchanan certainly does assail the Queen, and the passion which thrills through the _Detectio_, a sort of fury and abhorrence which makes every paragraph tingle. She had done nothing to Buchanan to rouse any desire for individual vengeance; and it is more rational, certainly, to believe that the horror of the discovery inspired with a sort of rage the bosom of the scholar--rage which was perfectly genuine in its beginning, though it might, no doubt, be raised to whiter heat by the continually increasing fervour of partisanship. The curious description of him given by Sir James Melville (the courtier, not the divine) that "he was easily abused, and so facile that he was led with any company that he haunted for the time, which made him factious in his old days; for he spoke and writ as they that were about him for the time informed him," would, if accepted, give a still easier solution to this question. But it is a little difficult to accept such a character of Buchanan, who does not seem to have been a man easily put off from his own way, especially when taken in conjunction with the Assembly's minute, recording his election as president "for eschewing of confusion in reasoning." It is more easy to believe the statement that he was "extreme vengeable against any man that offended him, which was his greatest fault."

The much darker accusation against Buchanan, that he was a party to, or indeed the most active agent in, the forging of certain letters reported to have been sent by Mary to Bothwell before Darnley's murder, and known far and wide as the Casket Letters, seems to rest upon nothing but conjecture. He was one of the few members of the party who possessed the literary gift, the only one, perhaps, except Lethington, whom Mr. Skelton has presented to us as not only a very enlightened statesman, but at all times the faithful servant of Mary, but who is accused by earlier writers of much tergiversation and falsehood. He it was, according to Chalmers, who was the forger, reaching the summit of wickedness "in forging his mistress's handwriting for the odious purpose of convicting her of the crime of aggravated murder." Chalmers was as sturdy a champion of Mary's innocence in the eighteenth as Mr. Skelton is in the nineteenth century, but the conduct of historical research has very much altered in the meantime. The changes have been rung between Lethington and Buchanan by various critics, but the last light upon the subject seems to be that there is none, and that if the letters were forged the forger at least cannot be identified by any art known to history.

It is unnecessary to pursue the question, or to bring further arguments to prove that nothing else in Buchanan's writings indicates the possession of such dramatic and constructive power as would be necessary for the production of such a letter as that professedly written from Glasgow, which is by far the most important of the contents of the Casket. A woman's distracted soul, divided between passion and shame, the very exaltation of guilty self-abandonment and the horror of conscious depravity and despair, is not a thing which can be imagined or embodied by the first ready pen, or even able intellect. No one of all the tumultuous band that directed affairs in Scotland has given us any reason to suppose that he was capable of it. Its very contradictions, those changes of mood and feeling which the most ignorant reader can perceive, are quite beyond the mark of ordinary invention. Mr. Froude has said that only Shakespeare or Mary Stewart could have written it--at all events the writer, supposing it to be forged, must have been of unquestionable imaginative genius. It is one of the most wonderful compositions ever given to the world. We look on with awe while those dark secrets of the heart are unfolded. The revelation is too tremendous, too overwhelming, and far too true to nature, to call forth mere horror and condemnation. It is a proof of the often-repeated statement that could we but see into the heart of the greatest criminal pity would mingle with our judgment. Nothing could be more criminal and horrible than the acts therein anticipated, yet we think it would be impossible for any unbiassed mind to read this letter for the first time without an increase at least of interest in the writer, so transported by her love, ready almost to brag of the falsehood and treachery into which it leads her, till sick shame and horror of herself breathes over her changing mood, and she feels that even he for whose love all is undertaken must loathe her as she loathes herself. To imagine Buchanan, an old man of the world, somewhat coarse, fond of a rough jest, little used to women, and past the age of passion, as producing that tragical and terrible revelation, is almost more than impossible, it is an insult to the reader's intelligence. And accordingly the latest writers on this subject have relinquished that accusation; they no longer charge the old pedagogue with such an effort of genius; they confine themselves to accusing him of ingratitude towards his benefactress, which is as much as to say that a little personal favour, even when well earned, is to compel a man to shut his eyes henceforward to the character and conduct of the person who has conferred it, and that both patriotic feeling and political policy are to be quenched by a pension, which is a strange view.

There can be no doubt, however, that Buchanan made out the case against the Queen with all the rhetorical force of which he was capable; that the accusation was bitter, as of a man who had been personally deceived and injured, as indeed it is quite possible that he may have felt himself to be; and that there was no pity, no mercy, nor compunction towards her, such as arose in many men's bosoms after a little time, and have been rife ever since both in writers and readers. The _Detection_ is without ruth, and assumes the most criminal and degrading motives throughout. Its intention clearly is to convince Scotland, England, and the world of Mary's utter depravity, and the impossibility of any excuse for her or argument in her favour. The strong and fiery indignation in it is indeed lessened in effect, at least to us in these latter days, by the over strength of the indictment; and the reader who turns from the perusal of the Glasgow letter--which damns indeed yet rouses a world of conflicting feelings, awe and terror and pity for the lost soul thus tragically self-condemned--to the historical document in which the charges against the Queen are authoritatively set forth, cannot fail to be struck by the difference. It is far from being simple abhorrence with which we regard the revelation of the one, but in the other there is no light; the picture is inhuman and impossible in its utter blackness, the guilt imputed to the Queen is systematic, unimpassioned, the mere commonplace of an utterly depraved nature. The wild emotion and terrible impulse in her becomes mere vulgar vice in her accuser's hands. In this there is nothing wonderful, nothing out of the common course of nature, which is prone to make every indictment more bitter than the facts that prove it.

But it may well be believed that it was something of a fierce consolation to the high-tempered and strong-speaking Scots, in the rush of universal popular condemnation, to believe and assert that the Queen, who had so disappointed and disenchanted all her well-wishers, had been bad through and through, indecent and shameless. The inclination, almost the wish, to think the worst of every fallen idol has not died out with the generation which condemned Mary Stewart; and Buchanan was the spokesman, the advocate of the other party, whose conduct could only be justified by the establishment of her guilt. If she were not guilty, they were traitors. If all the proof against her was but a mass of distorted facts and false swearing, nothing in the way of punishment was too bad for her unfaithful subjects. A mistake was impossible, the struggle was one of life and death. The spokesman in such a tremendous issue, the narrator and setter forth of the terrible question, especially if he is a person whose trade it is to write, and who can be accused of doing his work for hire, is always at a disadvantage. It can never be proved to the vulgar mind that he has not formed his opinions to order, that he does not give them out to the world according as they may best benefit and satisfy his employers. His masters may be hated, but he is both hated and despised. If it could be proved that Murray was solely actuated by ambition and the hope of getting the throne for himself, he would still be a belligerent with the honours of war due to him; but the scribe, the hireling who is employed to state the whole matter, has no position but that of a venal dependant ready to set forth whatever is for his master's interests. Thus the historian of a party, who makes money by his work, the literary advocate whose office it is to make the strongest statement possible of his employer's case, is subject--or at least was subject in more primitive times--to the worst reproaches. His testimony was seldom taken as conscientious or true.

Buchanan's _Detection_ was peculiarly subject to this reproach. It was written for the purpose of proving the case of the lords by demolishing entirely that of the Queen--before England and the commissioners of England first, seated in session to investigate the subject, and after them before the world in general. The inquiry which was opened at York in October 1568, six months after Mary's escape to England, was the most like a trial of anything in which her history was discussed. She was represented by commissioners, while Murray and several of his colleagues were present in person, along with Buchanan and other secretaries or minor commissioners. It was at this inquiry that the Casket Letters were first produced under, we are bound to say, if we judge by the rules of a period of settled law and order like our own, very suspicious circumstances. Even the question of the language in which they were written is a very difficult one. All through, indeed, this question is difficult, though it is never formally discussed until that tragical occasion. In what language did Mary and Knox hold their discussions? Could it be always in French that this accomplished Queen wrote and spoke? When she is reported to have said, as recorded in a previous chapter, "That man gart me greet sore, and grat never tear," is this expression, so distinctively and strongly Scots, a translation from some more elegant murmur in another language? She who had so many tongues, had she left out that in which she had been born, the language of her childhood and of her country? This problem is only considered by the historians when it is required to prove that a letter must be forged because it is apparently first written in Scots. There is also a very great point made of the difference between Scots and English, which seems to have been very slight indeed, a difference of spelling more than anything else, nothing that could confuse any but the most ignorant reader. The following sentences from Buchanan's "_Admonition direct to the Trew Lordis, maintaineris of justice_" will throw some light on the latter question, the difference between the written speech of the two different kingdoms, which one writer tells us would have made it easier for Queen Elizabeth to read letters in French than Scots:--

"It may seme to zour lordshippis," says Buchanan, "yat I, melling with heich materis of governing of comoun welthis do pass myne estait, being of sa meane qualitie, or forgetting my dewtie geveing counsal to ye wysest of yis realme. Not the les seeing the miserie sa greit appeiring, and the calamitie sa neir approching, I thocht it les fault to incur the cryme of surmounting my private estait than the blame of neglecting the publict danger."

From this the reader will be able to judge what extraordinary difficulty there was in the Scotch to an English reader of those days. The use of z instead of y, of y instead of th, are matters very easily mastered; and it is surely the utmost folly to suppose that Queen Elizabeth could have found the slightest difficulty in deciphering this northern version of the common tongue.

The document quoted above is a very powerful and no doubt also violent assault upon the Hamiltons, especially called forth by the murder of the Regent Murray, the slackness of the succeeding Government in the punishment of his assassin, and the powerful reasons there were for destroying--a measure which Buchanan thought imperative both for the safety of the realm and the child-king--that powerful family, the head of which was next in succession to the Scotch Crown, and had been popularly believed to be ready for any crime to obtain it. Now that there was nothing but the life of a child between the Hamiltons and this elevation, Buchanan lifted up his testimony against the supineness which left the race undisturbed to carry out its evil designs. Murray had been murdered in the beginning of 1570, and the _Admonition_ was printed at Stirling a few months later. In the same year Buchanan wrote that curious tract called the _Chameleon_, a satirical attack upon Lethington, which is not very brilliant either in language or conception, and fails altogether in the incisive bitterness which characterises most of Buchanan's other political papers. "It is at least equal in vigour and elegance to that of most compositions in the ancient Scottish language," says Buchanan's biographer, but few modern readers will agree in this verdict. Buchanan's hand had not the lightness necessary for such a performance. The guilt of Mary and the death of Murray furnished him with more emphatic motives than the iniquities of Maitland, and he was evidently stronger in assault and invective than in the lighter methods of composition.

It might have been supposed that his hopes of preferment would have been seriously injured by Murray's death. But it was after this event that he was selected for the greatest office which Scotland could bestow upon a scholar--the education of the young King. Buchanan's services were no doubt well worthy of such a reward: at the same time it may be allowed that a scholar so renowned, the first of contemporary poets according to the judgment of his class, and the greatest of lettered Scotsmen beyond all question, could not be passed over. During the intervening time he had retained the appointment of Principal of St. Leonard's College, his frequent absences being made possible by the fact that though he had much to do with the government and regulation of the University of St. Andrews, he was not actively employed in giving instruction. But after this we float at once into a halcyon time. It was in the end of 1569 or beginning of 1570 that he was appointed the governor of the King, and in this capacity and amid peaceful surroundings more appropriate to his character than the rage of politics, the old scholar becomes more distinctly visible than it was possible he could be in the midst of contention and under the shadow of greater men. He was about sixty-four at the time he entered upon the active duties of the office. "A man of notable endowments for his knowledge of Latin poesie--much honoured in other countries, pleasant in conversation, rehearsing on all occasions moralities short and instructive, whereof he had abundance, inventing when he wanted," says Sir James Melville. _Sandford and Merton_ had not been written for the advantage of schoolboys in Melville's days, yet the picture is that of an antiquated Mr. Barlow never forgetting the art of instruction. The particular anecdotes, however, told of Buchanan, do not recall Mr. Barlow or his "moralities" at all.

The little King James, a precocious and clever child like all the infantile monarchs of the house of Stewart, had been established at Stirling, always a favourite residence of the Scotch Kings, where he held his baby Court in peace while his mother pined in England, and the Scotch lords struggled for the mastery, and succeeded each other as Regents at home. The troubles of the world outside seem to have been kept far from the surroundings of the boy, to whom both the kingdoms looked as their heir, the child in whom the glories of his race came to a climax, and the union of the warring kingdoms was at last secured. Personally, he was by far the least distinguished of his name, but no one as yet suspected this fact or thought of Buchanan's pupil as less hopeful than any of the gallant Jameses who had preceded him. The little Court at Stirling was presided over at this early period by the Lady Mar, a dignified matron who was "wise and sharp and kept the king in great awe," although at the same time very tender of the child and respectful of his royal dignity. Almost all James's immediate surroundings seem to have belonged to this powerful race. The master of the household was a certain Laird of Drumwhasel, to whom no other name is given, and who is described as ambitious and greedy, a man whose "greatest care was to advance himself and his friends." Alexander Erskine, another member of the household, calls forth something like enthusiasm in the courtly narrative as "a gallant, well-nurtured gentleman, loved and honoured by all men for his good qualities and great discretion, no ways factious nor envious, a lover of all honest men, desiring to see men of good conversation about the prince rather than his own nearest friends if he found them not so meet." In addition to this official household were the tutors charged with James's education, two of them being members of the Erskine family, abbots of Cambuskenneth and Dryburgh, though those titles were no doubt merely fictitious, meaning only that the "temporalities," the endowments of the extinct monasteries, were in their hands. The other and principal masters of James were Sir Peter Young and Mr. George Buchanan. Young was "gentle, loth to offend the king at any time, carrying himself warily as a man who had a mind to his own weal by keeping of his majesty's favour"--"but Mr. George," adds the historian, "was a Stoick philosopher who looked not far before him." He "held the king in great awe," so that James "even trembled" as he himself says elsewhere, "at his approach," and did not spare either rod or word in the interests of his pupil. Some of the anecdotes of this severe impartiality are amusing enough. At one time annoyed by the noise which the King and his playfellows were making, Buchanan bade them be silent under certain penalties if the offence were repeated, and provoked by a childish impertinence from James, took up the little culprit and whipped him with exemplary impartiality, notwithstanding that his companion, the little Master of Mar, stood by, on whom vicarious chastisement might have been applied. Lady Mar, rushing to the scene of action at the sound of "the wailing which ensued," took the child from his master's hands and consoled him in her motherly arms, asking Buchanan indignantly how he dared to touch the Lord's anointed. The incident is very natural and amusing in its homely simplicity; the child crying, the lady soothing him, the sardonic old master in his furred nightgown and velvet cap, looking on unmoved, bidding her kiss the place to make it well. The Master of Mar no doubt would cry too for sympathy, and the old gentleman take up his big book and move off to seek a quieter place for study. On another occasion, when the little King tried to get a sparrow from his companion and crushed the bird in the struggle, Buchanan rated him as himself a bird out of a bloody nest. He was an old man and alone in the world, indifferent to future favours from a king whose reign he would probably not live to see, and treating him with impartial justice.

There was, however, no indifference to James's education in this austere simplicity: indeed it would seem that Buchanan, like other preceptors of monarchs, had some hope of forming an ideal prince out of the boy. A few years after his appointment to his office, and when James was still too young to profit by it, he began to write his famous treatise, in the form of a dialogue, upon the laws of the kingdom, the duty respectively of kings and subjects. The _De Jure Regni_, published when the King was about twelve, was dedicated to him in a grave and dignified letter in which Buchanan describes his work as an attempt to expound the prerogatives of the Scottish Crown, "in which," he says, "I endeavoured to explain from their very cradle, so to speak, the reciprocal rights and privileges of kings and their subjects." He goes on to say that the book was written in the midst of the public troubles with a view to enlightening the disturbers of the commonwealth as to their duties: but that peace beginning to be established he had sacrificed his argument for the sake of public tranquillity. Now, however, that it may be useful to the development of the King he brings it forth again. The direct address to James is full of that curious self-deception or defective insight which is so common among those who have the training of a pupil of great importance in the world. The boy had grown beyond the age of personal chastisement; he had reached that in which the precocious facility of comprehension, which is so strongly fostered by the circumstances of such a position as his, looks to the dazzled pedagogues and attendants like genius, and there seems no prognostic too happy or too brilliant for the new career in which at last there is about to be fulfilled all that men have dreamed of a king.

"Many circumstances tend to convince me that my present exertions will not prove fruitless, especially your age, yet uncorrupted by perverse opinions; a disposition beyond your years, spontaneously urging you to every noble pursuit; a facility in obeying not only your preceptors, but all prudent monitors; a judgment and dexterity in disquisition which prevent you from paying much regard to authority, unless it be confirmed by solid argument. I likewise perceive that by a kind of natural instinct, you so dislike flattery, the nurse of tyranny, and the most grievous pest of a legitimate monarchy, that you as heartily hate the courtly solecisms and barbarisms as they are relished and affected by those who consider themselves as the arbiters of every elegance, and who, by way of seasoning their conversation, are perpetually sprinkling it with majesties, lordships, excellencies, and, if possible, with other expressions still more nauseous. Although the bounty of nature and the instruction of your governors may at present secure you against this error, yet am I compelled to entertain some slight degree of suspicion lest evil communication, the alluring nurse of the vices, should lend an unhappy impulse to your still tender mind, especially as I am not ignorant with what facility the external senses yield to seduction. I have therefore sent you this treatise, not only as a monitor, but even as an importunate and sometimes impudent dun, who in this turn of life may convoy you beyond the rocks of adulation; and may not merely offer you advice, but confine you to the path which you have entered, and if you should chance to deviate may reprehend you and recall your steps. If you obey this monitor you will ensure tranquillity to yourself and your family, and will transmit your glory to the most distant posterity."

That James VI should be described as disliking flattery and despising authority, if not enforced by solid argument, is strange to hear; and that he should be so boldly called upon to consider a plea for national freedom and a constitutional rule, as the chief guarantee of tranquillity and honour, is still more remarkable. Certainly it was not from Buchanan that he got those high pretensions of divine right, which had never flourished in Scotland; although by a not uncommon paradox the most faithful partisans of the family which was brought to ruin by these pretensions were found in the northern kingdom. Very different were the doctrines upon which Buchanan nourished the royal child. James acknowledged afterwards not ungracefully the distinction of his instructor in letters. "All the world," he says, "knows that my master George Buchanan was a great master in that faculty." But his opinions in politics found no favour in his pupil's eyes when James emerged from his youthful subjection and began to show his native mettle. At twelve, individuality in that respect would scarcely be developed, and a reverence for his tutor's sharp tongue and ready hand would keep the King from premature opposition.

While this work was going on in the comparative quiet of Stirling, Scotland was lost in the turmoil of one of the most wild and terrible portions of her history. It is indeed rather from the glimpse we have of the little royal household in the foreground of all that strife and bloodshed, the Lady Mar in her matronly dignity, Buchanan in his furred gown among his books, and the clamour and laughter of the two boys interrupting the quiet, that we can believe in any semblance of peace or domestic life at all in the distracted country. The Regent Lennox, the King's grandfather, was killed under the very rocks of the castle where James learned his lessons. His young companion's father, the Earl of Mar, was taken from the family at Stirling and raised to a brief and agitated Regency, through all of which a civil war was raging. And till from beyond the seas there came the still more horrible news of that French massacre which convulsed the world, and made an end of Mary's party, nothing was secure from one day to another in Scotland. It was in the midst of that very tumult and endless miserable conflict, in which Mary's followers had at last set up the doctrine of her irresponsibility and divine right to retain her position as Queen whatever might be her guilt as Mary Stewart--that the scholar set himself to compose his work upon the rights of the kingdom and the duties of kings. His high temper, his strong partisanship, his stern logic, would find an incitement and inspiration in those specious arguments on the other side which were so new to Scotland, and had been contradicted over and over again in her troublous history, where no one was so certain to be brought to book for his offences as the erring or unsuccessful monarch. It must be difficult for a great classicist to be at the same time a believer in the divine right of kings; and it was a new idea for the mediæval Scot accustomed to reverence the name, but to criticise in the sharpest practical way the acts of his sovereign. And we may imagine that the old scholar, who could not but hear from his window the shouts of the warfare between the Queen's party and the King's, would have a grim satisfaction as he sat high above them, protected more or less by the royal name, in forging at his leisure those links of remorseless argument which, though they had no effect upon the pupil to whom they were dedicated, had their share in regulating that great rebellion which had so important an effect upon the after-history of the two kingdoms.

During this period, however, Buchanan had other occupations besides his tutorship and his literary work. He was made "director of the Chancery," whatever that may mean, and in 1570 was elevated to the post of Keeper of the Privy Seal, in which capacity he served in various Parliaments: and was also a member of the Privy Council. When the conspiracy arose against the Regent Morton which ended in his temporary deprivation of the regency, Buchanan seems to have taken part against him, though on what argument we are not told: for it was Morton's power which had brought about the re-establishment of peace and order to which he refers in the dedication of his book. And it is a feasible conjecture that it was by his crafty suggestion that the Regent's fictitious plaints of being weary of his high office and desiring nothing more than that the King's Majesty should take the government into his own hand, were ingeniously twisted so as to give his dismissal the air of a gracious consent to Morton's own wishes. An old man like Buchanan, well acquainted with the wiles of logic and the pretexts of state, was more likely to use an advantage in which there is a certain grim humour, and to take the adversary in his own toils, than such an inexperienced politician as young Mar, or any of the undistinguished nobles who carried out that stratagem. Whether Buchanan supported his old pupil, Mar, in his attempt to seize the governorship of the castle and the King's person out of the hands of his uncle, or in what aspect he was regarded when Morton returned to the head of affairs, we have no means of knowing. Whatever his influence might be at the King's ear or amid the secret meetings of the malcontents, neither as Lord Privy Seal nor as King James's tutor did he come in public collision with any public authority. His action, whenever he appears publicly, is perfectly characteristic of his real position and faculties. He took part in a commission for the establishment of a system of municipal law: he was one of the Church's commissioners on two occasions in determining her policy and discipline. When the reform of the Universities of Scotland, so often taken up since then, and so slow to be accomplished, was brought under the consideration of Parliament, Buchanan was one of the chief of the commissioners appointed to consider it. He is reported to have been the author of a scheme of reconstruction to be employed in the University of St. Andrews; and it is interesting to find in this new system that special attention was enjoined to be given to Greek, and that the study of Hebrew was also recommended to the students. The latter language, we believe, still remains an established part of the studies of young men in preparation for the ministry in the Church of Scotland. Buchanan desired that the Principal of his own College, St. Leonards, should lecture on Plato. And he made a present of a number of Greek books, still carefully preserved, to Glasgow University, though why he should have chosen to send them there, instead of to his own smaller and poorer University, we have nothing to show. It is thus apparent that in his active public work Buchanan's chief attention was given to his own proper subjects. There is no evidence that he did more than was indispensable to his official character in matters more exclusively political.

His old age thus passed, in a certain learned leisure which it is very difficult to imagine as existing in so tumultuous a period and amid so many violent changes and vicissitudes. He had many learned correspondents throughout the world, almost all the great scholars of the time being numbered among his friends; and the letters which he received from all quarters implied a considerable amount of letter-writing on his side. He sent copies of his books to his friends as if he had been the most modern of novelists, and it is curious to think of the big laborious volume of solemn Latin dramas, or that thin but weighty tome, instinct with another and more living kind of interest, which set forth the rights of nations--sent by some trusty messenger, a young scholar finding in the packet entrusted to his charge the best introduction to one of the lights of learning on the Continent, or some adventurer making his way to a commission in the Scottish Archers or other service of arms more profitable for a younger son than the frays and feuds of Scotland. The learned doctors of the Sorbonne, the scholars of Geneva, and the printers of Holland, replied on their side not only with elaborate thanks and eulogies, but with responsive presents, treatises or translations of their own, some of them dedicated to the royal boy who was the pupil of their friend, and of whom he gave so wonderful a description. "I have been guilty of trifling with a sacred subject," wrote Berger with his volume of poems, "and I have dedicated my trifles to a king." Another learned correspondent sends a Plato which he has edited, one volume of which he had also inscribed to James, begging that his friend would present it to his Majesty. They would seem to have shared Buchanan's satisfaction in his princely pupil, and it is chiefly by way of reflection, through these responses, that we perceive what his opinion of the young King was, and how much proud delight, expressed no doubt in the most classical language, he took in the boy's aptitude and promise. The following letter, however, which is not classical at all, but written in choice Scots and addressed to Queen Elizabeth's envoy, Sir Thomas Randolph, gives a less dignified but very graphic description of his own circumstances and occupations. It is written from Stirling during Morton's Regency, when peace prevailed and even prosperity had returned in some measure to the distracted kingdom.

"To Maister Randolph, Squiar, Maister of Postes to the Queen's Grace of England.

"Maister, I haif rescevit diverse letters frome you, and yit I haif answerit to nane of them--of the quhilk albeit I haif mony excuses such as age, forgetfulness, business, and disease, yet I will use nane as now, except my sweirness (reluctance) and your gentleness: and gif ye think nane of them sufficient, content you with ane confession of the falt without fear of punition to follow on my onkindness. As for the present I am occupied in writyng of our historie, being assured to content few, and to displease many therethrow. As to the end of it if ye gett it not or (before) this winter bepassit lippen (trust) not for it, no nane other writyngs from me. The rest of my occupation is with the gout quhilk halds me busy both day and night. And quhair ye say ye have not lang to lyif I trust to God to go before you, albeit I be on foot, and ye ryd _the post_: praying you also not to _dispost_ my hoste at Newark, Jone of Kelsterne. This I pray you partly for his awyn sake quhame I tho't ane gude fellow, and partly at request of such as I dare not refuse. And thus I take my lief shortly at you now, and my lang lief when God pleases, committing you to the protection of the Almighty. At Stirling, xxv. day of August, 1577.--Yours to command with service,

G. BUCHANAN."

The mild, aged jest about preceding his friend out of life though he must go on foot and Randolph had the advantage of commanding the Post, and his recommendation of the erring postmaster at Newark, who was a good fellow, throw a pleasant light of kindly humour into this letter. And we thus hear for the first time of the History, the greatest work of his life, which he seems to have begun in the tranquillity of the palace-castle, notwithstanding the hostile influence of gout and years--hostile above all to so great a piece of work. He was now over seventy, and the end of his career seemed near at hand, although he had but recently taken in hand so great an enterprise. Buchanan's History is not, more than other great histories which have succeeded it, an absolutely impartial work; but it is, throughout all his own stirring and momentous age, the record of a bystander with abundant means of knowledge and a keen apprehension of all the controversies and struggles of his time. If he may perhaps glorify too much the character of his patron and friend the Regent Murray, and take the darkest view of Mary, we can only say that he would have been more angel than man had he kept himself absolutely without bias in that hot and still unexhausted debate. And there was nothing angelical about the old scholar who had taken a part in so many historical events, from the siege of Wark Castle, where he was present as a boy, to the Conferences at York and Westminster, which were matters of yesterday. The science of history has so much developed since his time that it may almost be said to have made a new beginning; and much that was considered authoritative and convincing then has fallen into the limbo of uncertainty, when not rejected altogether. The many differing motives and agencies which can only be fully estimated when the period of discussion is past, have come to occupy a far greater space in the mind of the historian than had been dreamed of in Buchanan's days; and the careful examination of evidence with which we are now familiar was unknown either in the study of the writer or the courts of law during a time which has left endless questions from both to be debated and re-debated by succeeding generations. But yet Buchanan's History remains the most important and dignified record of the national existence up to his time; and no one would now venture to treat the story of ancient Scotland, the chronicles of her kings, or even the still undecided questions of Mary Stewart's life and reign, without the guidance more or less of this great authority. It was a bold step to dedicate to King James a record in which his mother's life was denounced and condemned with such unsparing freedom; but the astonishing absence of sympathy or human understanding shown in this was shared by the greater part of Buchanan's contemporaries, who evidently felt the facts of the mother's guilt to be too abundantly demonstrated and universally consented to, to demand any delicacy of statement as addressed to her son. No one, we think, can entertain any doubt of the historian's own strong conviction on this subject. Among the many fables current about Buchanan, there was one circumstantial and oft-repeated, of his repentance on his deathbed of his judgment of the Queen; but this is entirely set at rest by the affecting record which we shall quote farther on of a last visit paid to him by certain of his friends who had taken fright at the boldness of his statements, and feared that the King, now grown up and developing his own individual sentiments, might stop the issue of the book when he saw these uncompromising records.

We must add one pretty story of Buchanan's kindness to his brethren in scholarship and literature which shows the sharp and cautious scholar in a very pleasant light. A certain Thomas Jack, a schoolmaster in Glasgow, had composed in Latin verse a little book upon the ancient poets, called the _Onomasticon Poeticum_, and encouraged by the friendship already, as he says, shown to him by Buchanan, carried the book to him for revision.

"I found him in the royal palace of Stirling, diligently engaged in writing his History of Scotland. He was so far from being displeased by the interruption that he cheerfully took my work from my hands, and after reading two or three pages of it, collected together his own papers which were scattered on the table, and said, 'I will desist from my work till I have done what you wish.' This promise he accurately fulfilled; and within a few days gave me a paper written with his own hand, and containing such corrections as he thought necessary."

One can imagine the old scholar seated with his documents before him in the light of a broad window, perhaps arrived at some knotty point which wanted consideration, and turning from the crabbed papers, which would not fit themselves in, with that delight in a lawful interruption and temptation to idleness which only hard-working students know. Much has been said about the misery of such interruptions to the absorbed writer, but no one has pointed out the occasional relief and comfort which they bring. Buchanan must have hailed this occasion of evading for a moment his legitimate work with all the pleasure of an old critic and connoisseur suddenly appealed to with such a congenial demand. Even in our ashes live their wonted fires, and where is the scholar who does not turn with delight from his history or his sermon to criticise a copy of verses, to _savourer_ a fine latinism or dig his pen through a false quantity as if he were cutting down an enemy? Thomas Jack has departed into oblivion along with his _Onomasticon_: but this record of the friendly reception he and his book met with affords a delightful gleam of light upon the historian's waning days.

It is more remarkable when we find another witness describing our somewhat irascible and sharp philosopher as growing young again in the boys who surrounded him, and adapting his mind to all ages and classes of men. Probably by the time he came to be the King's preceptor Buchanan had ceased to be so compliant, or very probably conceived it appropriate, on principle, to be less indulgent to a pupil whose danger it would be to have too many flatteries and caresses.

We have no very clear record when it was that the tutelage of James was supposed to be over, or if Buchanan was ever formally freed from his office. Informally the King would have seemed to be more or less his own master at the end of Morton's Regency, when, though subject to "raids" like that of Gowrie and the contending influence of one party after another, there was no longer any Regent thought of, and the business of the country was conducted formally in the King's name. It would seem, however, from the dedication of the History, that Buchanan had ceased for some time before its publication to take an active part in James's education. He speaks in this of "the incurable illness" which made him incapable of "discharging the office entrusted to me of cultivating the genius" of the young King; and presents the book as making up in some degree for that personal failure. The History ends with the death of the Regent Lennox, he who was killed in Stirling almost under the historian's eyes, and when Scotland was still distracted between two parties, and in a state of civil warfare. It has been made a subject of reproach to Buchanan that he stopped his chronicle before the beginning of the Regency of Morton, because of his personal hatred to that brave and able personage--a singular charge, seeing that Buchanan lived only a few months after the last Regent of Scotland; and he has expressly mentioned in one of his dedications the increased tranquillity which was the result of Morton's government.

It is in Edinburgh we find the old man of letters in the last scene of his long and laborious life. In September 1581 he was visited by three gentlemen from St. Andrews, one of whom gives us the most lifelike and interesting account of this last interview. It would have been still more interesting had they afforded some indication where they found him, whether he had some pleasant room granted to him in Holyrood, after so many years with the King, a suitable retreat for his old age; or if he had retired to some private lodging in the Canongate to end his days. His visitors make no mention of such unimportant circumstances, but they leave us a most touching and faithful picture of the end of his life. These visitors were the famous Andrew Melville, Principal of the New College at St. Andrews, a scholar almost as distinguished as himself, who had at an earlier period been Buchanan's pupil, and who had acquired his great knowledge in the same way, in the famous schools of the continent; James Melville, his nephew, minister of Kilrenny on the shores of Fife; and Thomas Buchanan, the cousin of the dying historian. James Melville relates this last visit as follows:--

"That September in time of vacans, my uncle Mr. Andrew, Mr. Thomas Buchanan and I, hearing that Mr. George Buchanan was weak, and his Historie under the press, past over to Edinbruck annes errand (expressly) to visit him and see the work. When we came to his chalmer we found him sitting in his chair, teaching his young man that servit him in his chalmer, to spell a, b, ab, and e, b, eb, etc. Efter salutation Mr. Andro says, 'I see, sir, ye are not idle.'--'Better this,' quoth he, 'nor stealing sheep--or sitting idle which is as ill.' Thereafter he shew us the Epistle Dedicatorie to the King, the which when Mr. Andro had read he told him that it was obscure in some places, and wanted certain words to perfeyt the sentence. Sayes he, 'I may do na mair for thinking on another matter.'--'What is that?' sayes Mr. Andro. 'To die,' quoth he; 'but I leave that and manie more things for you to help.'

"We went from him to the printer's workhouse, whom we found at the end of the 17 book of his Cornicle at a place which we thought verie hard for the tyme, which might be an occasion for staying the haill work, anent the burial of Davie. Therefore staying the printer from proceeding, we came to Mr. George again, and fand him bedfast by his custom, and asking him how he did, 'Ever going the way of weilfare,' says he. Mr. Thomas, his cousin, shawes him of the hardness of that part of his Storie, that the King would be offendit with it, and it might stay all the work. 'Tell me, man,' says he, 'gif I have told the truth?'--'Yes,' says Mr. Thomas, 'Sir, I think so.'--'I will bide his feud and all his kin's then;' quoth he. 'Pray, pray to God for me, and let Him direct all.' So by the printing of his Cornicle was endit, that maist learned, wyse, and godly man endit this mortal life."

He was a pedagogue, perhaps something of a pedant, a hot partisan, a special pleader; but few lives can show a more dignified and noble end. If it was the truth he had written this old man cared for nothing else, not even for that fame which is the last infirmity of noble minds. The King might keep back the great work of his life, but he could not silence the lips in which no fear of man was. Whatever might happen afterwards, Buchanan's record was clear; to have told the truth was all with which he had anything to do.

There is a touch of what for want of a better word we must call cynicism in the humorous indifference with which the old philosopher is said to have discussed his own burial. Finding, as the story goes, that there was not money enough in the house for the last expenses, he ordered what there was to be given to the poor, declaring that he was not concerned as to what was to become of his remains. If they did not choose to bury him they might let him lie, he said in grim jest. He was, however, reverently buried by the authorities of Edinburgh, in the historical churchyard of the Greyfriars, attended by "a great company of the faithful," though no stone seems ever to have been placed to indicate the spot where he was laid. Thus in some unknown corner he rests, like so many other illustrious persons--a man who never rested in his life, and carried down his labours to the very verge of the grave. It is a curious satire upon human justice that his name should have been kept green in Scotland by the rough jests of an imaginary Geordie Buchanan, commonly supposed to have been the King's fool, as extraordinary a travesty as it is possible to conceive. It is almost as strange a twist of all the facts and meaning of life that the only money of which he could be supposed to be possessed at his death should have been one hundred pounds (Scots, no doubt), _arrears_ of the pension due to him from the Abbey of Crossraguel, given by Queen Mary to that learned pupil of the Sorbonne and lover of Lutetia with whom she read Latin at Holyrood in the early days before trouble came.