George Buchanan

cause Charles II., F.D., who never said a foolish thing, and never did a wise one, t

y were regarded as the most formidable and dangerous defences of the principles on account of which it had been considered judicious to kill Lord William Russell, and perhaps also in token that if Buchanan and Milton h

the People of England from Buchanan's De Jure Regni apud Scotos; but that was only 'Glorious John's' inglorious way of making himself controversially disagreeable. Milton put his own genius and experience into Buchanan's idea, and produced an essentially original work. But what although he had not? Milton was fighting a great battle, and was entitled, or rather bound, to use the best weapons, wherever he could get them. The anti-plagiarising spirit is often a mere form of va

mous sermons, which were not mere religious meditations, but political events of the most immense influence, present and future. The Reformation, particularly in Scotland, was, in its inception and establishment, a political, quite as much as a religious revolution, of which Buchanan was not simply an interested but recluse critic and dilettante spectator. He thought profoundly ab

a snuff-box and a policeman. But it seems less difficult to ask whether C?sar or Shakespeare, Alfred the Great or Alfred Tennyson, was the greater man. However that may be, there can be no doubt that Buchanan rose to very great eminence as an intellectual artist, both in prose and verse. He enjoyed an unsurpassed European reputation among the Renaissance magnates of his day. Henri Estienne, for instance,-Buchanan's Stephanus, our Ste

Joseph, there was but one man alive in his own line for whom he had a vestige of respect, and that was Casaubon; and he told him so, intimating that he might think a good deal of the compliment, as he, Joseph, was the only man in Europe who was capable of forming an opinion about him-a perfectly true if not absolutely humble observation. But

remum perducta

ec quo progre

rat Romani

uii Scotia

ld not go; and that as Scotland had in the past been the last line of expansion for the Roman Empire, so in the future it would, in the person of Buchanan, be found to have given the highest note of Roman eloquence. Of course it may be said that this was only the customary and privileged lie of the epitaph; but that it was really Scaliger's deliberate opinion appears from

reading Buchanan's poetry and he stumbled up against a false quantity, or what he regarded as such. He at once got up and pitched the volume across the room in disgust, probably with an accompaniment of expressions not loud but deep. Regarding which behaviour, two remarks seem natural. The

is authority on such matters, being both poet and critic himself, is much greater than Porson's, great though the latter was in his own department of research. Hallam is inclined to qualify the almost universal admiration of Buchanan's poetry, but one begins to doubt Hallam's judgment in this matter when he finds him preferring Buchanan's De Sph?ra to the rest of his poetry. The Sphere may contain exquisite isolated passages 'equal to Virgil,' as the enthusiastic Guy Patin maintained, but it is not properly a poem at all. It is really a versified and very lame defence of the exploded Ptolemaic Astronomy, totally destitute of the human interest which inspires so much els

he knew antiquities and such philology as was going, and had refurbished or even made a grammar or two as he went along. But he used these simply as instruments to his main aim as a scholar, which was to write as good Latin as Virgil, or Livy, or Horace, or Tacitus. There is nothin

state this on the authority of Dr. P. Hume Brown, the well-known author of George Buchanan, Humanist and Reformer, and I should not advise any one rashly to contradict Dr. Brown on any Buchanan matter. He seems to me to have mastered the entire subject, and to have left very little for subsequent research to do, unless some lucky 'find' of new sources should occur. I have been able to glean nothing from any quarter that I have not found already known to Dr. Brown, a

cottish people and their leaders before the public opinion of Europe for having, after the murder of Darnley, brought Mary's career as sovereign to a close, as being not only a public danger, but a public scandal. That the vigour of the brochure itself, backed up by Buchanan's immense reputation, went far to make Mary an impossible factor in European politics, is beyond question. To the same extent he made himself the bête noire of Mary's friends and apologists, and very brutal and very black they certainly made him out to be. In more recent times a school of sentimental historians has arisen,

is distinguished by a literary grace which cannot be claimed for Mr. Hosack, is on a level with him when he reaches Buchanan. 'Buchanan's atrocious libel' is common form with the Marians, and Sir John has it. Perhaps his gentlest reference is when he speaks of 'the industrious animosity of the man who had been her pensioner,' and when he desires to be specially severe, he speaks of 'grotesque adventures invented, or at least adapted, by Buchanan, whose virulent animosities were utterly unscrupulous, and whose clumsy invective was as bitter as it was pedantic.' Th

se, and indecent production, and can be read only by the historical student for the purpose of investigating the popular taste of its time. Its description of Buchanan as the 'Fule' instead of the tutor of King James, and its placing him at the English court of James, who did not ascend the throne of England until Buchanan had been twenty-one years dead, are sufficient commentary on its historical accuracy. At first s

hing objectionable in some of his writings, 'tell them I am summoned before a higher tribunal.' When good John Davidson called on him and reminded him of the usual evangelical consolations, he repaid him with some original causticity à propos of the Romish doctrine of the Mass, which would no doubt delight that worthy man. He never had much money at any time, and less than usual at the close; and when, on counting it up with his attendant, he found that there was not enough to bury him, he directed it to be given to the poor. But 'wha

n, or 'than being idill,' he added, which latter he maintained to be as bad as the stealing of sheep. Then the conversation wandered to his History, which was by this time in the hands of the printer. The Melvilles noticed in the proofs the well-known and ugly story of Mary's having got Rizzio's body removed to the tomb of James V. They suggested that the king might take offence at this reflection on his mother's memory, and that the publication might be stopped.

Scaligers, or even with Knox, was wholly funereal in character-indeed we know it was not-formed a sort of Buchanan myth, to which every witling who thought he had invented a good thing, and wanted to get it listened to by fathering it on a well-known name-a device not yet extinct-would contribute further bulk, although not more ornament. In this way an idea of Buchanan

ar, historian, controversialist, humorist, and great in all these dive