George Buchanan

‘Gud Religion’

‘He was also of gud religion for a poet,’ says Sir James, when adding the last item to the creditor side of his profit and loss account of Buchanan’s qualities. ‘Gud religion for a poet’ is good, and characteristic of the times which said Ubi tres medici, duo athei,—‘Three Physicists,[4] two Atheists.’ Humanists, and still more Humanist poets, were also suspect, and for the same reason. The rebellion against Scholasticism, the resuscitation of the old Pagan spirit in thought and art and science, involved a staggering blow to Ecclesiastical Faith. Men whose minds were steeped in the literature of ancient Greece and Rome could not take sympathetically, I will not say, to Christianity, but to the dogmatic system of the Church, and even to much of its ethical teaching. ‘Humanity,’ in the sense of ‘the humanities,’ really meant the antithesis of Divinity. The Renaissance was a wakening up of the human intellect, an assertion of ‘private judgment’ in every possible sphere of its exercise, and in innumerable instances the Humanist created a faith and a code of morals for himself, although for comfort and convenience he might conceal his spiritual interior from the view of the ignorant and the unenlightened. In many an instance he held that there was one law for the men who understand, and another for the ‘vulgar’ who cannot understand. Popes and priests were often at heart Humanists of the most ‘advanced’ type, pushing the right of ‘private judgment’ to its furthest limit, discarding the public creed, and in morals, exercising, in favour of their appetites, that dispensing power which ‘private judgment,’ the Pope’s successor in so many awakened intellects, carried over with it, at all events extensively into practice, while simultaneously a silent outward conformity with the established system was carefully maintained.

Not that it did not sometimes betray itself. It is a Roman dignitary who is credited with the famous remark about the profit brought in by ‘this fable of Christ’; and everybody remembers how horrified poor Luther was in Rome when he heard the priests at Mass saying panis es, panis manebis,—‘bread thou art, and bread thou shalt remain.’ The open licentiousness of many Church dignitaries of those days is too notorious for special mention. ‘Private judgment’ may be a primary human right and a duty owing by reason to itself of the highest order; but to cast off in its favour an inveterate obedience to authority, is a psychological problem surrounded with the greatest difficulty and danger, and unless when under the control of an adequately strong judgment and will, may cause much wreckage of faith and conduct. I do not think that Buchanan suffered much in this way—certainly not so much as many others among the leaders and supporters of the Reformation; while any damage he sustained was amply compensated by his gains. Knox and other Reformers—I speak of Scotland—were driven by the violence of the recoil involved in their assault on the Catholic and Feudal system into extreme positions, necessarily harmful to themselves, and bequeathing legacies of disadvantage to their successors.

They needed, through polemical necessities, an authority equal to that of Rome, which they had overthrown, and this drove them into placing Scripture in a position which the speculative and historical criticism of the last two centuries has made highly uncomfortable for many people of intelligence, including Broad Churchmen, whom it has driven into crypto-scepticism, and Evangelicals and Ritualists, whom it has moulded into wilful believers. Their denunciation and destruction of ‘idolatry’ and every rite ‘not appointed in the Word,’ with the necessity they lay under of maintaining a high standard of Biblical morality as a proof that Antinomian licence was not the necessary result of Justification by Faith, engaged them in a war against Art, Literature, and Natural Beauty and Pleasure, which, while it stamped the national consciousness with a grave, deep, and serious habit of regarding life, which is of the greatest value, produced also an immense amount, not yet exorcised, of official Pharisaism, popular hypocrisy, and practical pessimism, with all its miserable consequences. These were unfortunate results of the great rebellion against authority and claim of ‘private judgment,’ apparently suggested, in part at least, by self-defence; while the Nicene and Predestinarian dogmas were put forward with an emphasis and detail which would not be attempted in the present day, but were very seasonable in times when immaculate and even strained orthodoxy was both weapon and armour in a degree that does not prevail now.

Knox, it must be remembered, did not discourage the belief that he could predict the future and had a good deal of the ‘second-sight’ in him. He had a powerful political instinct, and he and his chief associates knew that if they went ‘too far’ in their destructions, the alarm would be taken, and the life and death struggle in which they were engaged would for them be lost for ever; and every man of any depth of thought or feeling is aware that the ‘doctrines of grace,’ in their inner, perhaps mystical, interpretation, and apart altogether from the stupendous metaphysical and historical setting assigned them in systems of Christian dogma, have a consoling, strengthening, and guiding influence on that vast body of serious, simple, if often practically powerful natures, to whom Criticism is neither a necessity nor a possibility. Such a union of accommodation and exaggeration need not be construed as of set purpose propositional in form, and deliberate in execution. In the transition from authority to private judgment initiated by Humanism and the Renaissance generally, special Reformation exigencies may be conceived as leading to such a union, so that in thought and action it was only semi-conscious and instinctive, and there was little time for the minutiæ of introspective scrutiny. On the ethical side, however, there was no Renaissance loosening among the mass of the leading Reformers. The value of the controversial mendacities propagated about the morals of Knox may be judged of by the fact that the coryphæus of the revilers maintained that he won his second wife by magic! As a rule they kept the ten commandments, and especially the seventh, rigidly. They failed a good deal on the new one of Charity. They preached the ‘Gospel’ with technical accuracy, but they mostly practised the ‘Law,’ and if Paul had returned among them, he would probably have re-edited his Epistle to the Romans, with up-to-date applications, as indeed he might have to do still.

CHAPTER V

BUCHANAN AND CALVINISM

In Buchanan’s case, the revolt from authority seems to have produced different effects. As regards dogma, it appears to have led him into an attitude of mind that was mainly negative. He had none of the ‘Evangelical’ fervour which marked the utterances of Knox, Luther, Calvin though to a less degree, and the Reforming preachers of Scotland. He never preached, in the popular sense of the word, although as Principal of St. Leonard’s and ‘doctor in the schools’ he could easily have had himself ‘called’ and ordained, if he had been animated by any zeal for the function. He could not have written such letters as Knox wrote, full of pious sentiment and sympathy, in phraseology that was absolutely unctuous, to Mrs. Bowes, and Mrs. Locke, and other women, who leant on him for a sort of semi-priestly or confessorial guidance. He was a critic, not a sentimentalist. You may read his whole works through, prose and poetry both, without knowing that he laid any stress on the Calvinism of the Scottish Church, except on its destructive side. Indeed, much of his literary work was done before he openly and formally broke with Rome, which he was in no hurry to do. He satirises the clergy, especially the monks, and ridicules such doctrines as those of Indulgences and Transubstantiation, the latter especially in the Franciscanus, where it is stated with a grossness and extravagance of literalism which would probably be disowned by the highest order of Catholic dogmatist. As the Franciscanus was published, after revision and completion, in his Protestant days, this may have been an addition of the period; but nowhere, in anything he wrote during the Protestant part of his career, does he emphasise, or almost even allude to, such doctrines as Justification by Faith, the Incarnation, the Atonement, Election, and Reprobation, or any of the positive dogmatic propositions most prominently characteristic of Scottish Protestantism.

Not a Zealot

It is remarkable that in his History he associates the Reformers less with Evangelium than with Libertas. They are the vindices libertatis—‘the champions of liberty’—quite as much or oftener than the Evangelii professores—‘the professors of the Evangel,’—from which it might seem that for Buchanan, not the least valuable aspect of Protestantism lay in its being a struggle for liberty—a view in which a good many other people will be ready to concur. Queen Mary, in her later years, protesting against Buchanan’s appointment as her son’s tutor, described him, in writing, as an ‘Atheist’; but that was in the sense in which Athanasius described Arius as an atheist, and is said to have seized an opportunity of striking him in the jaw in that capacity, to show what he thought of it and him. Arius, however, constantly professed himself a believer in ‘God, the Father Almighty,’ under, of course, ‘heretical’ modifications; but Athanasius thought that a wrong God—that is, a God that was not God, according to Athanasius—was no God, and spoke and acted accordingly. Buchanan was certainly no atheist in his own sense and intention, which, it must always be remembered, was essentially of a deep-sea seriousness, although the wavelets of wit might often dance and gleam on its surface. He manifestly held by some Almighty Power called by him God, Deus, Numen, Providentia; but whether this was the God of Mary Stuart, or the anthropomorphic God of Calvin, or the accommodation to the popular sense of reverence ascribed by many people, and not without reason, to Carlyle, might form a subject of discussion.

Bearing on this matter, passing allusion may be made to the Dirge or Epicedium, as he called it, which Buchanan wrote on the death of Calvin (1564), an event which occurred some three years, more or less, after Buchanan had publicly become a Protestant, when he was already a member of the General Assembly, sitting cheek-by-jowl with Knox, and on the Assembly’s judicial committee; the year when Mary, having been finally off with the Spanish Don Carlos marriage, was drawing towards the Catholic Darnley marriage, which Knox, correctly scenting on the way, was beginning to anathematise by anticipation, he having the year before fiercely denounced from the High Kirk pulpit the Spanish alliance as fatal to Scotland, because it was an ‘infidel’ marriage, and ‘all Papists are infidels,’ said the uncompromising one, in the true Athanasian vein, on the head of which he had quarrelled with Mary and Moray also; while all the time Buchanan was, to Knox’s knowledge, continuing to act as Mary’s Court poet, and possibly meditating on the ‘Pompa’ or masque for her wedding, and getting on so well with her that she was arranging for giving him that £500 (Scots) pension from Crossraguel Abbey, out of which it cost him such excruciating difficulty to get anything at all, at the same time that he was helping the General Assembly to revise the Book of Discipline, translating Spanish despatches for the Privy Council, and generally acting as ‘handy man’ on the highest planes all round. This ‘Dirge’ is too long for quotation: a curious attempt to combine the Pagan spirit and the Calvinistic theology—spiritual elevation and sarcastic wit in the best poetic form. ‘Those who believe that there are no Manes, i.e. no hereafter, or if they do, live despising Pluto and the trans-Stygian penalties, may well deplore their coming fate, while they leave sorrow to surviving friends. But we have no such grief over our lost Calvin. He has passed beyond the stars, and, filled with a draught of Deity (Numinis), lives in an eternal and nearer enjoyment of “God” (Deo). But Death has not taken all of him from us. We have monuments of his genius and his fame wherever the Reformed religion has spread. We have the terror which he struck, and which his name will continue to strike, into your Popes—your Clements and Pauls, and Juliuses and Piuses; while we know that the Pontiff tyrant of fire and sword who appropriated all the functions of the nether kingdom—becoming a Pluto in empire, a Harpy in his shameful extortions, a Fury in his martyr-making fire, a Charon in his viaticum (Charon naulo), and a Cerberus in his mitre (triplici corona Cerberus)—will have to appropriate the penalties also of the same lower world, becoming a Tantalus thirsty amidst waters, a Sisyphus rolling back the ever-recurring stone, a Prometheus with vultures ceaselessly pecking at his liver, a Danaid vainly filling her empty bucket, and an Ixion twisted into a circle on his endless wheel.’

À propos of Calvin’s ‘draught of Deity,’ Buchanan gives in the course of the poem what seems to be meant for an explanation of the spiritual work of ‘regeneration,’ which, I am afraid, would not have been so satisfactory to Mess John Davidson as some others of his efforts to propitiate that sound divine. As the soul animates the body, otherwise a mass of clay—sic animi Deus est animus—so ‘“God” is the Soul of the soul,’ and when the Numinis haustus, the ‘draught of Deity,’ has been taken, the soul which before was ‘shrouded in darkness, illusioned by empty appearance, and grasping at mere shadows of the “right and good,”’ sees the ‘darkness disappear, the vain “simulacra” cease, the unveiled face of “truth” reveal itself in light.’ I may be wrong, but this looks to me more like a Pantheistic theory of ‘illumination’ than the ‘regeneration’ of the Calvinistic creeds! Besides, there is no word of ‘sin,’ and the change to at least an incipient ‘holiness’ only from ‘illusion’ to ‘truth’ (verum). If it be said that this must be assumed, then a new contradiction of Calvinism arises, since a divine Soul of the soul cannot will evil, and ‘sanctification’ is thus erroneously made out to be an instantaneous act and not a gradual process. Altogether, and as it stands, the passage might have been written by one of those later Stoics, including possibly Aurelius himself, who seem to have believed in the indwelling Divinity, and that the souls of good men at death were not immediately reabsorbed into the All, but lived with ‘God,’ in some cases a thousand years, in others for ever, or, at all events, until the ‘philosopher’s year’ was over, and the new cycle began to repeat the history of the old.

But there is one omission which, among various others, seems remarkable. Of the relics enumerated by Buchanan as left by Calvin, he passes over the most important of all—Calvin’s own body. He makes no reference to the resurrection. Yet, on orthodox principles, Calvin’s glory and beatitude could not be complete until that event. If Calvin had been writing about Buchanan, instead of vice versa, he would not have forgotten the matter, for he laid great stress upon it. ‘He alone,’ he says, ‘has made solid progress in the Gospel, who has acquired the habit of meditating continually on a blessed resurrection.’ Buchanan’s silence here and on other points that have been mentioned, and the scantiness, brevity, for the most part simply Theistic references he makes to matters of faith, are significant. He clearly was not zealous about most of those doctrines on which the Reforming preachers placed the greatest emphasis. His training and wide intellectual illumination must have stood in the way of his sympathising with the more violent among them, probably not excepting Knox himself occasionally. In this connection one thinks of another illustrious son of the Renaissance, Erasmus, Buchanan’s senior by forty years. After all he had said and done, the Protestants demanded, with loud reproaches, that he should publicly join their ranks. Erasmus would not, perhaps could not. The alternate violence and unctuousness of the Evangelicals repelled him as much as the ignorance, and worse, of the monks disgusted him. With certain reforms in morals, constitution, and discipline, he did not see why the old Church should not be satisfactorily worked on the lines of the traditional doctrine and ritual. Probably he thought that if a man could reconcile himself to the Nicene dogmas and their consequences, it was not worth his pains boggling over Transubstantiation. Although any one may see that his heart was in many things with the Reform movement, he had never directly and openly denied any dogma. Apparently he was not prepared in his own mind to do so.

If a man is asked, ‘Do you deny that Abracadabra is Mesopotamia?’ he can probably say ‘No’ quite conscientiously; and there can be no doubt that this attitude of non-denial is widely accepted for positive faith. The Roman Church, and the Roman Empire before it, were quite willing to take it so. If a man would hold his peace, they would let him alone. Erasmus condemned the outbreak of Luther, whose faith in the immense amount of doctrine he left untouched he perhaps regarded as simply a huge faculty of taking things for granted, ending in straining at the gnat and swallowing the camel. For myself, as one of the crowd, I am glad that with all his blunders and shortcomings, so easy to point out at this distance, Luther took his own way, and did what he did. Truth is greater than peace. ‘Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,’ is the method of Christianity, unless the Founder of it is mistaken. The martyrs had faults and weaknesses—say even that they were mistaken,—but they were men of nobler spirit, and did more for us and our liberties than the traditores, the ‘traitors’ who handed over their Scriptures to the Prætor rather than face the lions. Up to a certain point, Buchanan’s attitude seems to have been practically that of Erasmus. He tells us himself in his Autobiography, that while a student at the University of Paris (1526-29, pp. 20-23) he ‘fell into the spreading flame of the Lutheran sect.’ Several years later (1535-38), while resident in Scotland, he wrote some satirical verses on the Franciscan monks, which the brethren took in high dudgeon, very much to Buchanan’s astonishment—boys always are astonished that frogs should object to the pleasant amusement of being stoned,—and gave him so much annoyance, ending in his having to flee the country for his life, as to make him, in his own words, ‘more keenly hostile to the licentiousness of the clergy, and less indisposed to the Lutheran cause than before.’

Silent Doubt

All this time, however, he appears not to have attacked or denied anything in creed or ritual, although there cannot be a doubt that he had his own secret doubts. The relentless persecution of the monkish enemies he had made for himself at last brought him before the Inquisition (1548) at Coimbra, in Portugal, where he was acting as ‘Regent’ in a college recently founded by the King; but although the Inquisitors had him through their hands several times, they discovered nothing against him that could properly be called heretical. He was said to have eaten flesh in Lent, but everybody did it there, when they could get it. He was said to have given it as his opinion that on the Eucharistic controversy Augustine’s opinions were more favourable to the Lutherans than to the Church; but that was merely literary or historical criticism, not heresy. Two young gentlemen testified that Buchanan was not at heart a good Catholic—which was probably true enough, but was not specific. So they shut him up, as already said, in a monastery to be taught by monks, who, though good fellows, did not know anything; and for want of something better to do, Buchanan made his famous Latin paraphrase of the Psalms. What must his Faith have been during those years? Manifestly, like that of Erasmus, less a positive assent than an abstinence from denial. Would he deny Transubstantiation or the Trinity? No, he was not ready to do anything of the kind—anyhow, not yet.

It need not be maintained that in all this Buchanan, or Erasmus either, was merely seeking to save his own skin. He may have thought that it was best for the order and edification of society to let things alone. Probably too, by this time, that spirit of Stoicism, which I have shown reason for believing sank deeper into Buchanan’s nature as time went on, was beginning to assert itself. And here, in passing may I say that the common popular image of the Stoic as a gloomy, unbending, sour, cantankerous, repulsive curmudgeon, is a mistake. There is nothing in Stoicism to make him so, and as a matter of fact he was not so. Aurelius was a finished gentleman. Seneca had all the culture of his time, and was the poet of the day. Boëtius was a polished courtier. When Buchanan went over to the Reformers, it was the smartest epigrammatist going who was joining the most advanced party and leaving the ‘stupid’ party behind. To return. It was a well-known rule of the Stoics not to quarrel with the popular beliefs, but, if possible, to utilise them for good, as we see Buchanan does with the Pagan mythology in his Dirge on Calvin’s death. Socrates, their model wise man, teaches conformity to the cult of the city where the sage resides; and everybody will recollect the care with which, as his trial approached, he arranged that Esculapius should have the cock that was due him. Probably Esculapius is still receiving a good deal of that class of poultry. For a long time—indeed until he was fifty-five, the last five of which he spent in carefully scrutinising and balancing theological controversies, and examining the whole situation—Buchanan followed the lines of Erasmus, used the cult of the Roman Esculapius to go on with, pending eventualities. But when the termination of the Guisian tyranny in Scotland made it safe for him to return, he had to make up his mind whether he was to side with the cause of oppression as advocated by the Church in which he had been born and lived up to now, or that in which, though unfortunately with certain drawbacks, a battle was being fought for liberty to express opinions different from those taught by the Church. Nobody who knew Buchanan could doubt what his choice would be.

The transition would be all the easier that in his new quarters he would find much less to offend his philosophic reason than in his old ones; but would there not be an occasional bird to be sacrificed still? He had been doing it all his Catholic life. Was it completely over now? That is not likely. But, however that may be, Buchanan was the least dogmatic and the most tolerant of all the theologically instructed men who helped to give Protestantism its place in Scotland. He might have preached had he chosen, but as he shrank from priest’s orders in the Catholic Church, so he shrank in the Protestant from a position in which he would be bound to dogmatise. He did not frown upon Mary’s private Mass, while Knox denounced it as worse than ten thousand armed opponents. When he narrates the hanging of a priest, according to statute, for saying Mass a third time, he does not exult, as was no doubt done by the men of the ‘Congregation,’ and possibly by Knox himself, when they heard of the happy event. There is nothing about him of the zeal of the renegade, who often out-Herods Herod in championing his new faith—a tendency from which Knox was by no means free. In his History he evidently tries to hold the balance fair between Catholic and Protestant, and is as just to Mary of Guise as to Moray. His whole religious career points to a man who thought profoundly and inquired anxiously after truth, and was careful to give expression to his feeling of reverence for the mystery of being by outward conformity with a creed and ritual to which he could more or less reconcile his reason. Well might James Melville (Rev., not Sir) describe him not only as a ‘maist learned and wyse,’ but also as a ‘maist godlie’ man, although he himself might have preferred ‘spiritual’ as a more comprehensive epithet.

It may be objected that men like Buchanan and Erasmus did not act honestly in remaining silent and conforming members of a system which they secretly regarded as in many vital respects false, and an imposture upon the world. Of course, it is to be said for Buchanan that he did ultimately come out of it; but then, why not sooner? Why did he not earlier follow the lead of Luther and Calvin and Knox? For one thing, it must be remembered that even these great heroes of veracity had probably their reticences. At all events, they have left to us the legacy of an incompletely performed work. Was their outspokenness equal to Christ’s? His brought Him to the cross. It seems to be in the nature of the Ideal that to make an utterly clean breast of it should be perilous or fatal to its revealer, and the hero of Truth who dies in his bed has probably made a good many compromises with his conscience to achieve that result. It is all a matter of degree, a comparison of the well and the very well, of the bad and the too bad. A good man is a man who tries to be good, and a bad man is a man who does not care whether he is bad or good. But man is finite, and there can be nothing absolute in human life, except perhaps the absolute fool who thinks there may. Everything depends on the state of the facts. In these days, for instance, when historical and speculative criticism has put Scripture and the supernatural in so very different a position from that assigned to them by the Reformers, there is too good reason to believe, especially in the light of intra-ecclesiastical demands for the revision of Confessions and Articles, that many of the clergy feel extremely uneasy in being pledged to dogmas which they more or less disbelieve. As they could not speak out without having to face starvation for those dependent on them, a merciful man might be disposed to say that while the situation was bad, it was perhaps not unpardonable, and that the person implicated might still be regarded as a good and otherwise honestly intentioned man. But if the inner state of mind should be one of hopeless antagonism to the supernatural, one would be disposed to say that it was ‘too bad’ to remain, and that speaking out and coming out, at any cost, was the duty of the position.

Bearing in mind that Buchanan carried his life in his hand, and that he had never undertaken the function of religious teacher, only a very heroic person could afford to say that he had not done all he dared, and that he showed himself deeply in earnest about Truth, when at last he had the opportunity, and really ‘was of gud religion for a poet,’ and even for a more hopeful character. Buchanan, on the intellectual side of him, was not merely a poet, but a wit and humorist—a type of mind not in itself easy to harmonise with being of ‘gud religion.’ Perhaps if the Puritans had not been in so many cases hopelessly wooden, it might have saved their cause from having so many joints in its harness open to the shafts of the satirical sharpshooter, but they would probably not have done so great and grave a work in the world. Dire, however, are the fruits of an igneous temperament and a ligneous intellect, and Praise-God Barebones and Co. have done an evil turn to a good undertaking. The capacity and habit of seeing and enjoying the ludicrous are a temptation to their possessor to forget that life has its serious aspect also, and in too many instances this seems to be forgotten. Hence the presumption is against the laugher until he has become better known. I recollect once hearing a celebrated preacher give a highly comical account of his own conversion, and albeit not given to the frowning mood, I could not help asking myself whether this could be a serious man; and it was not until I read his life that I saw he knew that there is a time for everything under the sun, and that he possessed the secret of assigning its due claim to all views of life. Buchanan, too, had mastered this power—for it requires an effort of will, and there must always be an essential difference between the humorous man’s view of religion, and that of the man who cannot show his teeth by way of smile, though Nestor swear the jest be laughable. Buchanan could sparkle when sparkling was in place, but he could also be depended on when grave or even grim work was in request.

Renaissance Morals

Part of the price paid for the enlightenment of the Renaissance was that in too many instances its breadth of ethical as well as intellectual outlook was allowed by its possessor to sink into a practical licentiousness, open or concealed, that corrupted, or even totally destroyed, the moral and spiritual faculties. I cannot see proof of any such results in Buchanan’s case. I think he was careful to secure himself from danger on this side of his temptations. His bitterest detractors do not raise a whisper against him here. But there is a section of his poetry which may best be characterised as of the Ad Neæram, In Leonoram (Lenam), Ad Gelliam, Ad Briandum Vallium pro Lena Apologia order, which has occasioned misgiving to some of his friends. One biographer, a very competent authority on this period of Scottish history, says, somewhat severely, that these pieces ought not to have been written by the man who wrote Franciscanus—a powerful satire on the vices and hypocrisy of the monks. I must say that, with every deference to a critic highly worthy of respect, I am not able to see it. The Franciscanus was essentially an exposure of dishonesty, not so much of the vices practised under the cowl, as of the shameful trickery of using the cowl to cloak them. As far as honesty and consistency go, there is no reason why an honest and consistent man should not have written every word of these ‘Lena’ sketches. Even from an artistic point of view they will stand inspection. The subject, of course, is a revolting one, and so is Dame Quickly—but would any man of average robustness of mind wish Dame Quickly unwritten? Many people seem to forget that while the real itself may be unpleasant, the artistic image of the real may be a delight. We should shrink from Caliban in the flesh, but Shakespeare throws a charm over him; Pandemonium is not, I believe, a sweet scene, but Milton’s account of it is sublime; Falstaff was disreputable, but he makes an admirable stage figure; a corpse is an unlovely object, but Rembrandt’s ‘Dissectors’ has a fascination.

Probably it was for want of noting this distinction that the late Principal Shairp, who was a good judge of a certain class of poetry, lamented that Burns should have written Holy Willie’s Prayer and the Jolly Beggars!—a remark which led Louis Stevenson, in a compassionating way, to hint that Burns was perhaps too ‘burly’ a figure for the Principal’s microscope. There is a good deal of this ‘burliness’ in Buchanan’s Leonoras, which in point of graphic power are second only to the Jolly Beggars, while their savage and even hideous realism, contrasting with the elegance of the Latin line, produce a piquant effect from the mere point of view of art. But I demur to any suggestion that these or any of Buchanan’s so-called ‘amorous’ poetry are corrupting or intended to be, or that they exhibit any gloating over the degrading or the degraded on the part of the writer. From references in them I believe they were satires written for the warning of ‘college’ youth, and resembled certain passages in the Book of Proverbs and elsewhere in the Bible, where certain counsels, highly necessary and practical, are conveyed in language not deficient either in directness or detail. They could not possibly scandalise or tempt any one, being written in Latin. Mr. Podsnap and the ‘young person’ would pass equally scatheless, for they could not read them. Only men who could construe and scan Horace could understand them, and these might be trusted to see their true drift. Then the Ad Gelliam verses were merely playful little satires upon ladies who painted, or wore brass rings and glass gems, which might amuse readers, while producing no effect, good or evil, upon their subjects. As to the Neæra series, they are not love-poems at all, but epigrams. There is no passion, sensuous or otherwise, in them. What show of manufactured emotion there may be is simply a stage-scaffolding on which to plant and fire off the epigram. Probably the best known of the series is the following:—

which James Hannay, who was well able to appreciate this class of work, translated thus:—

adding that ‘Ménage used to say that he would have given his best benefice to have written the lines—and Ménage held some fat ones.’ What anchorite could discover anything exceptionable here, or if he had any intelligence left, could fail to perceive that it was simply a case for admiring extreme cleverness of thought and smartness of phrase? If any one desires to see how Buchanan could appreciate and address the highest type of womanhood, let him read such verses as the Ad Mildredam or the Ad Camillam Morelliam, and he will see that he was a man with tenderness in him as well as virility, with grace as well as severity of speech; and the fact that in his maturer years he was not ashamed to publish the incriminated poetry, showed that he was not conscious of anything to be ashamed of, that he knew the poet’s dominion was conterminous with the whole range of things, and no part of it whatever exempt from his critical or sympathetic function, while his fiercest or lightest dealing with the facts of life is in no way inconsistent with a profound and silent veneration in presence of the mystery of existence.

CHAPTER VI

BIOGRAPHICAL FACTS

Earlier and Continental

Buchanan was born early in February 1506, at Moss or Mid-Leowen, on the Blane Water, about two miles south-east of Killearn in Stirlingshire, of a ‘family ancient rather than opulent,’ as he tells us in his Autobiography, so that he was delivered from the peasant or upstart consciousness which, except in the priesthood, would, in those feudal times, have handicapped him heavily in the race of life. His real and Scoto-Irish clan name was Macauslan, but the Macauslan having acquired the lands of Buchanan in the Lennox, took the name of his property, and became Buchanan of that Ilk; and thus it came to pass that our George ranked as a ‘cadet of Buchanan,’ as Hannay was proud and particular to specify. Ancient lineage, however, is no insurance against misfortune, and the Buchanans of Moss, never rich, sank into deep poverty. The father died in George’s youth, and the grandfather who survived him was a waster and became a bankrupt, and Agnes Heriot, the mother, was left to struggle with the upbringing of five sons and three daughters—a task however, which she successfully accomplished, like the heroine she was, as her most distinguished son gratefully commemorates. Having never known wealth or luxury, perhaps it was easier for Buchanan to reconcile himself to their opposites in after years. In the Lennox they talked Gaelic, and Buchanan picked up that speech to begin with. He would also learn some Scotch or Northern English from his mother, who came from Haddingtonshire, and in addition she was careful to have him sent to the schools in the neighbourhood, where he could learn the elements of Latin.

For the old Church had not entirely neglected popular education, as has been shown, in a very interesting way, in Grant’s Burgh Schools of Scotland, and as, indeed, appears on the face of the Reformers’ First Book of Discipline itself (1560). Most of the burghs maintained schools, both secondary and elementary, so that the barons and freeholders who were ordered by the celebrated Act of James IV. (1494) to keep their heirs at school until they had learned ‘perfyt Latyn’—then the international language of the educated and of diplomacy—had abundant opportunity of doing so had they chosen, although unfortunately they too seldom chose; so that the burgh schools were largely recruiting-grounds for the priesthood. There were also elementary Church schools, in many cases taught by women, and private adventure schools; and in these a considerable number of the children of the poor were taught at least to read. Accordingly, when it is said that Knox and the Reformers established the Scottish Parish School system, a little discrimination must be exercised. They did not invent popular education—they found it; but they did invent, on paper, in the First Book of Discipline, the idea of bringing education to the people’s doors, by securing that there should be a school wherever there was a ‘kirk’—that is, practically in every parish; so that ‘the youth-head and tender children shall be nourished and brought up in vertue, in presence of their friends, by whose good attendance many inconveniences may be avoyded in which the youth commonly fall, either by over much libertie which they have in strange and unknowne places, while they cannot rule themselves; or else for lack of good attendance, and of such necessaries as their tender age requires.’

So far the Book of Discipline, at once recognising an existing educational system, and suggesting, for reason given, the vital improvement of its national application! The whole scheme, indeed, is admirable, including as it does compulsion, the picking out and, in the case of the poor, supporting the class of youth suited for the higher kinds of service to society, while the others not so gifted ‘must be set to some handie craft, or to some other profitable exercise’—that is, technical education, or some other form of practical training. I have said ‘on paper,’ but not by way of sneer, and ought to add in passing, that it was not the fault of Knox and his associates that it remained to a great extent merely ‘on paper,’ instead of being immediately and effectually established. It was the fault and the disgrace of a different type of men. Knox, as I have already said, was a politician, and made dexterous use of the ‘Lords of the Congregation’ to secure the triumph of Protestantism. But these ‘Lords of the Congregation’ were politicians also, and made an equally dexterous use of Knox to fill their own pockets with Church spoil—I except a few, who were really noble men. They gave little for parish churches, and nothing that I ever heard of for parish schools. The whole thing broke poor Knox’s heart. It did not ruffle Buchanan, although he was probably the greatest educational enthusiast in Europe at the moment. But he was really a greater intelligence and a calmer master of himself than Knox, and probably knew that any one who expects to find more than twenty-five per cent.—if so much—of the race as existing at any given moment worthy of intellectual or moral respect, must either have had little experience of life, or possess a very low standard of human excellence.

Not till 1696 was the plan of the Book of Discipline adumbrated in legislation, and the successors of the ‘Lords of the Congregation’ bound by law to provide a school-house and a salaried teacher in every parish. But during the whole of the intervening century and a third, the Presbyterian clergy never ceased in their efforts, and often their sacrifices, for popular education, while at the same time fighting a steady battle for liberty against as mean and cruel a crusade of Absolutist Monarchy and Ecclesiastical Tyranny as ever was preached by a ridiculous and pedant Peter against a self-respecting people. For myself, I fail to find much of the theology of the Covenanters credible—although I must say I should like if we could hear Knox and Melville, or even Cameron and Cargill, on the existing state of things. I think we should get some different guidance from what we are receiving from those blind leaders of the blind who shiveringly and stammeringly attempt to fill their places. For it is almost impossible to appraise too highly the service done by the Covenanters for the cause of liberty and popular education; and although they had their very obvious faults, one is always sorry to think that the aristocratic and Episcopalian prejudices of Scott should have led him to hold them up to ridicule, while glad that a higher and juster view was taken by a greater Scotsman even than Scott, when, in answer to a contemptuous critic of the men of the Covenant, Burns turned on him with the withering impromptu:—

We go back to young George Buchanan (1517-19) at the Catholic local grammar-school of Killearn or Dumbarton, or wherever else in the neighbourhood secondary education was to be had. The boy had shown such aptitude that his uncle, James Heriot, who is said to have been Justiciar of Lothian, sent him to the University of Paris, then, though not quite so much as at an earlier date, enjoying the reputation of the most notable of any seat of learning in existence. Instead of being required to pass through the preparatory school, he at once began his studies in the Arts faculty (1520, age fourteen), his Scottish acquirements having apparently been sufficient to pass him through whatever entrance examination was imperative. Here he spent about two years, working mainly at Latin versification, which, as his reputation for Latin poetry was to be the making of him in after years, was perhaps the best thing he could do, especially as he liked it. At this point, as evil fate would have it, his uncle died, and he himself fell ill. But as he was penniless, he had to struggle home, illness and all, as best he could, and was not able to move about again for a year or thereabouts (1523). And then it turned out that a very singular purpose had entered the mind of the ill or convalescent student of seventeen.

[Here ends Dr. Wallace’s MS.]

That purpose was to enlist as a volunteer in an army for the invasion of England, to be led by the Regent Albany, who had supposed wrongs of his own as well as of the borders to avenge against that old neighbour and untiring enemy. That army, consisting of French auxiliaries and Scottish recruits, marched to Melrose and then partly crossed the Tweed by a wooden bridge, then, holding Flodden in memory, intimated a mutinous resolution not to cross the border, then marched down the left bank of the river, and for three days besieged Wark Castle to little effect, then made a sudden night-march to Lauder in a snowstorm, ‘which told heavily on man and beast,’ and reduced Buchanan to very bad health for the rest of the winter. Buchanan, when he came to write his own life in his old age, had come to believe that he joined this abortive expedition to learn the art of war, which, without intentions more far-seeing than those of a lad of eighteen, he certainly did, just as Gibbon was educated to understand the evolution of the phalanx and the legions, by what he saw, in his two and a half years’ captaincy of the Hampshire Militia, of the evolutions of a modern battalion. In the spring of 1525 Buchanan appeared as a ‘pauper student’ at the University of St. Andrews, doubtless specially well qualified both as a student and as a ‘pauper’—which epithet ‘pauper,’ however, meant probably nothing more opprobrious than a youth who required board and education free, like many a score of St. Andrews students, from poet Buchanan to poet Fergusson, who about two and a half centuries later sat at the bursar’s free table and said grace over the too plentiful college rabbits that were last century procured from the links that now swarm only with golfers. He was sent there, he tells in his Autobiography, to ‘sit at the feet of John Major,’ the celebrated logician of that age; but he did not long sit at his feet as pupil before he felt in a position to criticise his master as a teacher of sophistry rather than logic. Next summer, having taken the St. Andrews B.A. degree, he followed or accompanied Major to Paris, and there passed through two years’ adversity under pressure of poverty and the suspicion of not being an orthodox Papist. Fortune relaxed her frown, and he was admitted to the College of Ste. Barbe, in which he was Professor of Grammar for three years. Meanwhile Gilbert Kennedy, the young Earl of Cassilis, one of the earliest of Scottish hero-worshippers, had the insight to appreciate his learning and genius, and the devotion to adhere to him as friend, pupil, and protector for five years. In 1533, the tutor dedicated to the pupil his translation of Linacre’s Grammar, one of the items of work done by him during his professorship in the College of Ste. Barbe; and in 1558, after this pupil, who had held a prominent position among Scottish nobles, died, probably from poison, at Dieppe, on his way home from the marriage of Mary Stuart to the Dauphin, along with the other three Scottish commissioners who had attended it, Buchanan celebrated him in emphatic Latin verse that is now better known than most contemporary epitaphs. Let it be told, however, to illustrate the cross-threads that run through the web of life, that Queen Mary, on 9th October 1564, granted to Buchanan, who had been her tutor also, and probably the most learned and intellectual of all her friends, a pension of £500 Scots, or £25 sterling a year, from the Abbey of Crossraguel; that the then Earl of Cassilis, son of Buchanan’s old pupil, claimed the temporalities of that abbey as his own, and sometimes stopped temporarily, and often permanently diminished, the pension which had been granted by the Queen out of the spoils of the Reformation, tarnishing by pious Protestant greed the brightest page in the history of the earldom of Cassilis.

After Buchanan’s tutorship of the father of this grasping Protestant was ended, and Buchanan was proposing to return to his old scholar’s life in Paris, James V. detained him to act as tutor to one of his natural sons—not the one known afterwards as the Good Regent, but James Stewart, Prior of Coldingham. This king, who entertained the idea that the clergy ought not to disregard the moral law as if they were royal personages like himself, set Buchanan to the not uncongenial task, upon which Dunbar and Sir David Lindsay of the Mount had previously been engaged, of ‘lashing the vices’ of the clergy, and especially of the monks. In the form of a dream, Somnium, he represented to St. Francis the reasons of a decent man for refusing to enter this order of sainthood—reasons which, because of their truth, might satisfy a saint, but which also, because of their truth, would likely be disagreeable to sanctified hypocrites and scoundrels. Two palinodes, wearing the aspect of apologies, were seen by those who understood irony to be rather stinging aggravations of the original satire. After some months of a mixed tumult of priestly rage and secular laughter, the royal love of fun and of virtue again prompted Buchanan to renew the attack, which he did by beginning Franciscanus, not published till 1560, and then dedicated to the Regent Moray and gradually extended to a thousand Latin lines, which contain the most polished, skilfully contemptuous exposure of the arts, ignorance, and vices of the later generations of the Romish clergy in Scotland. It is still worth reading by all who enjoy rough, boisterous, coarse humour, as also by all anti-Papist fanatics, even if they should renew their Latin studies for nine months to enable them to understand and utilise it. These men, drenched with satire, published and unpublished, whose craft of various hues was endangered by it, of course thought that it would be judicious if not just to burn its author. Cardinal Beaton had him on his list of heretics,—for what heresy could be so dangerous as disbelief in the solid, well-fed, red-faced exponents of infallible truth? In 1539 he escaped from prison in Edinburgh[6] when his guards were asleep. But being warned after the King had received the MS. of The Franciscan that Beaton had offered this fickle monarch a price for his head, he felt constrained to bid farewell once more to his native country. He fled to England, but, as Henry VIII. was then busy burning all shades of believers that did not suit his personal fancy, Buchanan thought it prudent to trust his safety and his fortunes once more to Paris. On arriving there, however, he found that Cardinal Beaton was there before him as ambassador, so on the invitation of Andrew Gouvéa he withdrew to Bordeaux. There he taught three years at least in the public schools, and wrote four tragedies for the annual exhibitions of these schools, to wit The Baptist, Medea, Jepthes, and Alcestis. In the College of Guyenne he had Gouvéa as a principal, and as a pupil Montaigne, the celebrated sceptic, who is dogmatic enough to state in one of his essays that Gouvéa was ‘without comparison the chiefest rector in France,’ and that he himself had, as a principal actor, ‘undergone and represented the chiefest parts in the Latin Tragedies of Buchanan.’ When here, Beaton and the Franciscans harassed him until that fear was dispelled by the plague raging over Aquitaine and the death of his fickle patron, the King of Scots.

Next, about 1547, in the wake or under the convoy of Gouvéa, he migrated to Portugal in response to the invitation of the King to teach in a resuscitation of the University of Coimbra that was being then worked out at great expense for education in the liberal arts and the philosophy of Aristotle. Many of his friends, eminent for learning, were there before him, and he expected to find peace in that out of the way corner of the world. But Gouvéa died suddenly, and then all his enemies ran at him with open mouth. He was thrown into prison, charged with writing against the Franciscans and eating flesh in Lent. The Inquisitors tormented themselves and him for six months without stateable result; and then, thinking it prudent, and perhaps honest, to conceal that their toil had been in vain, they shut him up in a monastery to be converted to the true faith or to be prepared for the fagots. To the great scholar, however, the monks, though ignorant, behaved not unkindly. They allowed him the truest literary leisure and quiet he ever had except perhaps in St. Andrews; and he devoted it to the so-called translation of David’s Psalms into Latin verse, which are in truth artistic evolutionary expositions from Hebrew hints, or splendid blossoms of sacred poetry grown from the seed given by the poet-king of Israel to the winds of heaven, in the moments of inspiration occurring in a life of suffering, of passion, and of hope. Never elsewhere did the iron fetters of Buchanan’s own environment permit him to soar so close to the firmament.

When set at liberty, though the King of Portugal offered him the means of subsistence, he returned to England. But as affairs were then in disorder under a young king, he in a short time returned to France and celebrated the siege of Metz in a Latin poem, not without the approbation which rewarded all his efforts in that line of composition. Thereafter the Marshal de Brissac called him to Italy, and he lived with him and his son in Italy and France for four years till 1560, spending much time in writing his poem De Sphæra, and in study of the religious controversies then seething through civilised Europe, and carrying it into a scientific region that rendered a poetic exposition of the Ptolemaic system a work of futility and utterly misspent power.

In 1561 he returned to his native country, and there indicated his Rationalistic leanings to the side of Protestantism. Nevertheless, the non-Protestant Mary Stuart, of ever-living memory in the realm of history and romance, pursued her studies in Livy and other classics with his help. As formerly mentioned, she endowed him with a pension of £500 a year. But in after years Mary’s faults or her misfortunes threw them into the hostile camps that tore Scotland into confusion and deadly discord. In regard to the murder of Darnley, he came to the conclusion, on the evidence of open foes and of professed friends, that she was guilty. He preferred truth to the beautiful queen, and it is difficult to comprehend how any man capable of weighing and scrutinising such evidence as was accessible to him can blame him.[7]

Buchanan has been accused of ingratitude to Mary, his friend as well as his mistress, divinely gifted and divinely appointed. He may have been compelled to seem ungrateful through the lying of ill-informed Reformers and rogues; but sure am I that his Latin and other Humanist studies with that most fascinating and accomplished of women, or at least of queens, gave him the opportunity of forming an idea of her intellectual powers and unsurpassed personal charms that no other contemporary in Scotland was mentally and morally capable of forming, and I don’t doubt that this idea finds sincere expression in his dedication to her of his version or paraphrase of the Psalms of the Hebrew poet-king, without any hint whatever of kindred royal frailties, or of tendencies thereto. What Buchanan must have seen in her when he had the best opportunity of sight and knowledge stands recorded unalterably in his noble verse that rolls down the centuries, bearing an impress of insight and sincerity unequalled in the poetical portraiture of queens till Tennyson laid his dedication at the feet of the most illustrious and fortunate of all her countless descendants. A true poet I believe to be a true seer, and incapable of falsehood to the extent that he has had the chance to see. But a true poet may be deceived. Spenser and Shakespeare were deceived into uttering gross flatteries about Queen Elizabeth; but they were deceived by the dense atmosphere of lying by which one of the cleverest, falsest, most hateful of women of all history encompassed herself. That Queen Mary should have been no worse than she was in a world with her royal cousin and rival flaunting her fictitious moral and physical beauties at the head of it, and getting prematurely canonised as the Good Queen Bess, ought certainly to qualify or blot out for ever all that can be stated truly and justly in condemnation or even grave censure of Queen Mary. Therefore let the modest and honest muse of History cease howling and canting about her crimes, and try to refrain from lavishing eulogy upon her kindred in position and in blood—Henry VIII., the Royal Bluebeard, and his inconstant, cruel, deceitful daughter—a pair of monarchs whose fickle affections led so many adventurous wives and ambitious wooers to the scaffold, by processes that involved the partial but temporary corruption of their country’s conscience.

The wants and troubles of his country beset Buchanan with many a call of duty, and cast upon him loads of multifarious work, such as perhaps never in the history of human-kind before were thrown upon the most accomplished and studious of living men. The tasks assigned to Buchanan, and the duties imposed upon him, reflect no inconsiderable honour and credit upon his lawless, homicidal, half-civilised countrymen. While still friendly with Queen Mary, he gave effect to his Reformation convictions, by sitting and working for years, from 1563 onwards, as a member of the new-born democratic General Assembly, knowing well enough that it was an institution that the Queen would have been happy to see strangled, even before it began to discuss the scandals of Rizzio and Darnley with the plain-spoken impudence of a rustic kirk-session and the arrogance of an infallible tribunal. Buchanan was one of the Commissioners that revised the Book of Discipline, and, along with Knox and others, was a member of a committee appointed to confer regarding the causes that fell, or that ought to fall, within the jurisdiction of the Kirk. In 1567, a few days after the beginning of Mary’s imprisonment in Lochleven, Buchanan filled the chair of the Moderator of the General Assembly, a position that for generations has not called for the worldly wisdom and terse, impatient talk of a layman, and seldom, if ever, so much required to be reminded of the limits of its power and jurisdiction as when Buchanan sat as its Moderator, and the head of the State was a captive.

In the previous year, Queen Mary’s half-brother, the Earl of Moray, commendator of the Priory of St. Andrews, and as such patron of the Principalship of St. Leonard’s College there, appointed Buchanan to that office, which he held for four years. During these years St. Leonard’s, which in the first year was studentless, became the best attended of the three St. Andrews colleges. But the fame of the ‘greatest poet of the age’ could not permanently revive the fortunes of St. Leonard’s, nor did the efforts of the Parliamentary Commission of 1579, of which Andrew Melville as well as Buchanan were members. By the time Dr. Johnson was on his way to the Hebrides, the College buildings were ruinous and forsaken, including St. Leonard’s Church, of which the Doctor could not see the inside, because of decent excuses exciting in his mind the hope that ‘Where there is still shame there may yet be virtue.’[8]

The Regent Moray, Buchanan’s patron and friend, to whom the Franciscanus was dedicated, was a recognised mainstay of Protestantism, heartily hated by the allies of the Queen and of the Pope. He was assassinated in Linlithgow on 20th January 1570, partly to further their interests and partly to gratify private revenge. Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh was waiting for him in the house of his uncle, Archbishop Hamilton, with small-bore matchlock and lighted match, and the accident of a crowded street gave him the opportunity of a deliberate aim. His death was laid at the door of the Hamiltons, and it stirred the patriotism of Buchanan to write a political pamphlet, called an Admonition to the Trew Lordes, in the vernacular of Scotland, directed against the Hamiltons and their friends—a publication full of practical insight, good sense, and cogent argument, the work of a wise, earnest, sagacious man, who in the zeal for the good of his country forgot that he had the gift of poetic inspiration, in that respect very unlike his great successor Milton when he too became a political pamphleteer, more rhapsodical than relevant. He suspected the Hamiltons of a desire to secure the crown, and Buchanan very much preferred to them Queen Mary and her son, whose birth he had welcomed as a star of hope for his country. His birthday ode of welcome, ostensibly intended for the boy when he grew up, but positively in the meantime for the guidance and the warning of his mother, is in substance a serious homily on the duty of kings to God and the people, from whom their power came, and whose will and welfare alone justified its exercise. The essence of the De Jure Regni underlies it, an essence never practically intelligible to the fated House of Stuart. Neither the beautiful, brilliant Mary nor her erratic but not stupid race could understand the teaching of Buchanan as an exposition of the law of the King of kings. The fate of that race, from her flight to England to the flight from Culloden, has helped the world to understand it. They were doomed to be born in and live through ages of ignorance, superstition, and falsehood, in which few men arose who could discover and recognise truth and publish it at their risk for the dark here and the darker hereafter, as was done by Buchanan. He may not have been infallible, but he had insight, veracity, and courage, the like of which will never be exhibited by his traducers to the end of time. Those who can believe him guilty of base ingratitude and malicious falsehood are incapable of discriminating the best from the worst in human nature and in human history.

Buchanan’s truthfulness and resolute desire to be impartial can be best inferred in our time from his History of Scotland, at which he had written for years, and for which he had collected materials from his boyhood. The style of it appears to be an eclectic adaptation of available and appropriate elements from the styles of Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus. It wants the special charm of ‘Livy’s pictured page,’ for Scottish places, deeds, heroes, and tastes did not for Buchanan’s earnest, realistic, dialectical, judicial mind present inducements to poetic word-painting—indeed, it was after his day, before the fascinations of the picturesque dawned upon the mind of Scotland, unless it may have been to some semi-mythical, mist-inspired member of the tribe of Ossian. The speeches of his History are the most tersely expressed, forcibly reasoned specimens of ancient Scottish oratory, assuming, of course, that they ought to have been delivered, but that they never were. They want the terse, pregnant suggestiveness of the orations of Tacitus; but they may probably appear to be not less skilfully adapted for the dramatic surroundings in which they are supposed to have been delivered. Young students of Latin, especially in the Aberdeen region, have found it to be for their interest to read and re-read Buchanan’s History, and it is in the original that the literary art and linguistic skill of its author can be best seen. But it is still worth reading, and is often read in Dr. Watkins’ translation, which as a translation reflects a good deal more credit upon its author than his old-womanly, newspapery but not dishonest attempt at original historical composition shown in his bringing down of Buchanan’s masterly story to the culmination or extinction of Scottish history in the visit of George IV. to Edinburgh. The babes and sucklings of the school of Dry-as-dust assert that Buchanan is superseded as an historian; but a man of Buchanan’s powers and opportunities can never be superseded as a narrator of the history of his own time.

Buchanan died on the 28th September 1582, a few days or weeks after his History had been published. He had striven, in spite of old age, ill-health, and poverty, to accomplish this long-meditated patriotic task; and when he had corrected the proofs and given it to the world, he felt that his last slender tie to life was broken, and his long, chequered, poorly-paid day’s work was done.

His death took place in Kennedy’s Close, the second close off the High Street of Edinburgh above the Tron Church, as recorded by ‘George Paton, Antiquary,’ upon the rather reliable authority of an ancient Lord Advocate, Sir James Stewart of Goodtrees.

His last lodging was in ‘the first house in the turnpike above the tavern,’ and occupied some few cubic feet of space, probably about twelve feet above the existing causeway blocks of Hunter Square, an entirely vanished pile of tall, substantial, over-populated masonry, part of the crest of the High Street once, standing within a quarter of a mile of the vanished garden in which Darnley was found dead in his shirt without mark of violence, still nearer to the site of the vanished house in which Walter Scott was born, and to the vacant air-space once filled by Johnny Dowie’s vanished tavern, in which during his Edinburgh sojourn Robert Burns was wont to make merry with select friends.

The records of the Commissary Court show that Buchanan left no property except £100 of his Crossraguel pension (gifted by Queen Mary, and withheld as often and as long as he could by the Earl of Cassilis), which had been in arrear from the previous Whitsunday. His ‘Inventar’ exhibits him in his true character of an ancient philosopher, whether Stoic or not. The civic authorities of Edinburgh, who from time immemorial have been ready and willing to bury scholars, buried his body the day after his death at the public expense. The ground of Greyfriars, one of the spoils of the Reformation, was then being turned into a burying-ground, and Buchanan was the ‘first person of celebrity’ buried in it. The exact spot of his sepulture is, however, in doubt, though a small tablet was put up by a humble blacksmith to mark where it is believed to be—a tribute of hero-worship like to that in Parliament Square which is supposed to mark the burial-place of Knox.

It is not likely that Buchanan ever asked the Town Council of Edinburgh for bread, but it is believed that they gave him a stone—without any inscription, however, to show for whom it was intended, so that by 1701 it was lost or stolen. His skull also is believed to be one of the lawful and sacred possessions of the Edinburgh University. If genuine, it may be a phrenological curiosity. Sir W. Hamilton once used it at a lecture which was listened to and approved of by Thomas Carlyle. Sir William demonstrated to Carlyle’s satisfaction that the said skull, supposed to be Buchanan’s, was according to phrenological dogmas far inferior to that of some ‘Malay cut-throat’ or other unredeemed ruffian. Assuming this to be the fact—and my authority for believing it is a letter of Carlyle published in Veitch’s Life of Sir W. Hamilton—I am surprised that Mr. Hosack and Sir John Skelton were not converted to phrenology. But for my part, believing in the universal but mostly untranslatable symbolism of Nature, from the ‘flower in the crannied wall’ to the human face and form divine, and believing only to a limited extent in phrenology as the dark side of physiognomy that is open to touch rather than to sight, I should hold that the skull which was inferior to a Malay’s in any respect except thickness could never be the skull of Buchanan; and it would not alter my conviction to feel sure that George Combe was present at Sir William Hamilton’s lecture, and for the first and only time in their career of phrenological disputation expressly agreed with him. Whatever Buchanan’s head and face may have been like—and his portraits impute to him either sleepy, benevolent dulness, or ferrety, peevish conceit—it is not believable that his head or face could have ever resembled that of a Malay or any other kind of savage. So acute a logician as Sir W. Hamilton ought to have doubted one of his premises at least, and been able to conceive it possible that the resetters of dead men’s skulls may be sometimes the victims of outside, as well as inside, deception.