and Co

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 successfu

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 Disc

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

siastical 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 imp

n League a

blood-cost S

d Freedom's

lave, indulge

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 afte

s Dr. Wal

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 h

r, 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

. 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 quie

em, 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 wri

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

t 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

ing 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 r

r 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 member

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

s 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 l

ld age, ill-health, and poverty, to accomplish this long-meditated patriotic task; and when he had corrected the proofs and given

inburgh above the Tron Church, as recorded by 'George Paton, Antiquary,' upon the r

ll, 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

cient 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,

med 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 convic

LOG

eresting as lying remote from everyday experience. These, however, the inquiring reader, to his reasonable satisfaction, can find elsewhere; what he will never find elsewhere are Dr. Wallace's ultimate, deliberate, critical estimates of the life and work of Buchanan. His book, as it grew under his nimble pen, grew, probably uncons

oomed by circumstances or by conscience to poverty and the discrediting influences of poverty, though fit to furnish invaluable light and guidance to their fellow-men. Methinks the pre-Reformation church was a kinder, less harsh nursing-mother to the inquiring, doubting, hesitating, satirical Protestant, than the dry-as-dust nurses of ultra-Protestantism, agnosticism, atheism, and sincere worship of nothing except Mammon's golden calf were to the learned literary man of our day who, afflicted with distracting doubts himself, and many sorrows, could still give reasons for his faith in a supreme Creator and an administrator of the universe according to fixed law and unswerving right, and could help to lift the mind of his age out of a darkness deeper than Popery-the blackness of atheistic despair. Both knew about politics as revealed in the wrangling of churches or religious sects, and the

stranger to the entanglements of foolish pleasure and the illusions of earthly hope, who had the most of his possible life behind him and eternity in no distant prospect, and who had no conceivable motive to applaud murder or to tell lies. Sceptical by innate constitution, and educated to doubt in the schools of adversity and experience, personal and historical, he was not the man to commit himself hastily to faith in dark dogmas and half-explored truths; he was the m

eformed by the destruction of Gothic or any other architecture which took its form under the sincere art and piety of buried generations. Cardinal Beaton's mode of burning good true men to support and preserve the divine truth that had vitalised his Church for centuries was irrational and infernal; but it was not very much worse than the mad, destructive fury inspired by John Knox's 'excellent' sermons, which, whatever their merits, can scarcely have emanated from a mind that had any clear comprehension of the processes by which spiritual truth makes its way and holds its power effectively among mankind. Beaton and Knox were both powerful in their age and characteristic

g the precipices overhanging death and ruin? Why should the Reformers, who had the means of ascertaining that among them he was a veritable Saul among the prophets, and neither a fanatic nor a hypocrite, not have utilised his wisdom and his inspiration of the beautiful and the true to direct the course and shape the limits of the Reformation, without proclaiming a barbarian, everlasting divorce between the power of truth and the beauty of holiness? Why should the spiritual force and illumination of every great man who did not wear fine raiment and fare sumptuously every day, of the prophets of Jud?a and the sages of Greece and Rome, have been lost upon their contemporaries and left to find its way and its expanding efficacy in the slow course of centuries? Buchanan's lot was the common lot of unendowed, and therefore unappreciated, genius. The greatest scholar and writer of his own country in his own time, one of the most potent of the intellectual aristocracy of Europe for all time, he was a rustic in dress, a plain, unpretentious, non-assertive inhabitant of the European villages called cities, known to h

TNO

stnut, Quid distat inter sotum et Scotum?-Mensa tantum. ('What divides a s

and called the king's 'Pedagogue,

erior (in this case the king); which, as they de

meaning more accurat

o have afterwards w

n League a

smile, now

reedom, too,

slave, indulg

mproved, the sent

s Herkless's Cardi

opposition pleader, capable rather than scrupulous, who did not know all the facts, and who was instructed by men who had other purposes to serve than telling the whole truth, and who probably did not know it themselves so well as Skelton had opportunities to come to know it, e.g. in regard to the 'Casket Letters'-documents that could be satisfactory to no modern tribunal except a Dreyfus court-martial. Buchanan's attack, in a pamphlet written in Scotch, upon Skelton's hero Maitland, entitled The Chameleon, Skelton sneers at as a 'Dawb'-not entirely an inaccurate criticism,

embraced all that existed of Buchanan's old dwelling-house, and pointed out one particular part of the ancient outer wall thick enough to resist the artillery of Buchanan's day. Dr. Johnson's general contempt for Scotland, which did not keep silence in St. Andrews,

and his life-battle for truth, and I don't believe sufficiently in the vileness of human nature to believe in any of the charges of immorality which rival ecclesiastics have persisted in relating against him. But for all that, I am not blind to his human imperfections. I am far from thinking him to be a perfect man, much less a perfect Christian. His wild joy and unbr

N

to Trew Lor

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Marshal

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estimate

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between Era

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his conduct and t

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seek p

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up First Book of

pal of St. Leona

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d for James VI.

rks to the king-Baptistes, D

the Prefaces

cots Stoic ph

tly mann

eness towards Mor

garding Scots

of Sir J. Melvi

gious vi

formation po

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zeal

of Evang

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mity allo

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amorist p

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lic Church and

ngregation and

ears of edu

lunteer to inva

Andrews Univ

to St. Ba

ith Earl of

him to write Fr

the vengeance

rison to the C

gal: seized by th

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d and declares for

ween Mary and

gratitude tow

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tion to the T

of his History o

's last

place and p

f his sk

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mming up

tween Dr. Wallace

, 107

82, 89, 90,

ron,

ill,

, T., 3

ubon

Lord, 51

llus

n, the,

s on Buc

es II

ero

college o

de Guy

n, Lords of

anter

, 128,

, Can

ari? Regin

enes

s, Lambi

, the

ne, Book

ght, 9, 1

n, Jo

Willia

in Catholi

, doctri

th, Que

invasio

13, 34, 9

ic contro

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ce,

the, 50, 90,

liel

ly of Church o

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n, 67

dré de, 58

ey, t

n, Sir

Psalms,

VIII

t, J.

, Kin

dias

cotland, 50,

ace

ack

, 28, 43, 58,

tion, t

gence

ion, the

IV.,

V., 50

., 46, 5

, S., 1

ion by Fai

earn

75, 76, 81, 85, 92, 10

yle, 17,

oetry, t

Earl of,

X.

s Inn Fi

31, 51

her

Sir D.,

slan,

, Joh

ntess of

, 31, 37, 40, 51, 64, 75

f Guis

and James, 23,

Sir Jame

, John

of Assembl

igne,

33, 37, 51, 81, 92

rl of, 73,

pieces

Dogma

Univers

tius

niversit

, Guy

ion,

Victor

son

, 43, 51

inarian

of St. Leo

judgme

Sir T.,

Scots, 11, 83

, the, 83,

glish, American

o, 12

olic hospi

ch, 28, 97

Lord Wi

University

ust,

the, 12, 13

Sir W

, 63,

Princi

peare,

Sir J.,

Buchana

es, 69

hanu

on, R.

er, 53, 63, 66,

tus,

on, 12

ray, 3

es, th

stantia

orth,

ter, 53,

RESS ON THE 'FAMO

LYLE, by H. C

ish Week

new series. The typography is everything that could be wished, and the binding is most tasteful.... W

rary Wor

yet written, far outweighing in value some mor

otsman

influence in the domains of morals, politics, and social ethics, the volume reveals not on

w Daily Re

blishers, and worthy of a national

tional Ne

n an able, masterly, a

SAY, by Olip

otsman

his subject, and bestowing conscientious pains on his task, has his materials well in

le's Fri

he life of the poet, as well as a well-b

urgh Disp

scholarship and much e

ly Reco

us little wig-maker lives fo

gow Hera

and intelli

LER, by W.

itory Tim

a very fine sense of Hugh Miller's greatness as a man and a Sco

kseller

ry plainly and carefully set forth. A short appreciation of his scientific labours, from the competent pen of Sir Archibald Geikie, and a useful bi

ly News

a very vivid

X, by A. Ta

ing, in The

ng times in Scotland, and of that famou

eeman

r's life, and in its estimate of his character and work it is calm, dispassi

eaker

in this book, as

School Chro

more to Scotland 'than any million of unblameable Scotsmen who need no forgiveness.' His literary skill, his thorough acquaintance with Scottish ecclesiastical life, his religious in

URNS, by Ga

w Age

d, almost as good as Carlyle's Essay and the

odist Ti

oper perspective, and Mr. Setoun does neither praise nor blame too copiously.... A diffi

h sa

te and discriminating; he sees and states his evil qualities, and beside these he places his good ones in their fulness

ADISTS, by

ham Daily G

ar theme, Mr. Geddie's contribution to the

hers' Circ

use the old ballads with a quickened zest after reading Mr. Geddie'

w Age

appreciations of the ballad literature

ectato

literary history of Scotland. We do not know of a book in which the sub

ERON, by Profe

eeman

nwearied research, by his collecting materials from out-of-the-way quarters

stian Ne

and enables the reader to form a conception of the man who in his

ee Couri

manly style adopted is exactly suited to the subject, and Richard Cameron is presented to the reader in a manner as interesting as it is impressive.... Profe

G SIMPSON, by Eve

eaker

pithy sayings it helps us to understand in a vivid and intimate sense the high qualities a

y Chroni

" that his countrymen have been proud of since the time of Sir Walter.... There is not a dull, irrelevant, or superfluous page in

s Mercur

as been wisely advised in giving prominence to her father's grea

LMERS, by W.

ectato

s perfect balance and proportion. In other words, justice is done equally to the private and t

Congregatio

fe which Dr. Blaikie has written without feeling admirati

WELL, by W.

ectato

s Scots Series," and one of the fairest and most discrim

e Adverti

t makes W. Keith Leask's biography of him one of peculiar merit and interest.... It

ing Lead

ould have been arrived at-by way of the open mind.... The defence of Boswell in the concluding chapter of his delightfu

LLETT, by Oli

ee Couri

e work without being struck not only by its histo

ly Scots

Mr. Smeaton give a scholarly sketch and estimate of Smollett's literary career, he constantly keeps the reader in conscious tou

and Bookseller

d place in any gallery of gifted Scots, such as the one to whic

SALTOUN, by W

gh Evening

ond describes, in a clear, terse, vigorous way, the constitution of the Old Scots Parliament, and the part taken by Fletcher as a public man in the stormy debates that took place p

s Mercur

letcher of Saltoun that has yet appeared. Mr. Omond has had many facil

eaker

Fletcher of Saltoun in this mon

D GROUP, by Sir

otsman

skilfully blended together much pleasantly writ

ly Citiz

d Group" is a phrase abounding in promise. And really Sir George Douglas fulfils the promise he tacitly makes in his title. He is intimately acquainted not only wi

CLEOD, by Jo

tar s

man as typical of everything generous and broadminded in the State Church in Scotland as Thomas Guthrie was in the Free Churche

s Pictor

effective, while the criticism

Free Pre

free from dulness. His attention once secured, the reader is carried irr

y Chroni

is hero, and has given us in this little vol

SCOTT, by Geor

Mall Gaze

itique of the Waverley Novels will, I venture to think, despite all that

ing Lead

d charming

mes's Gaze

a better picture of Scott than Mr. Saintsbury, and there

s Magazi

tive reading, and is a worthy additio

F GRANGE, by L

otsman

d these are sought out from the best sources and are arranged

gow Hera

gh piece of work, showing w

eaker

ng contradictions of a great career, as well as to s

kseller

a very instructive and inter

USSON, by Dr.

nster Gaze

ged, was under so many obligations. Dr. Grosart is perhaps the best living authority on all that relates to the bard of "The Farmer's Ingle," and he give

ish Week

ainstaking book, a genuine contrib

ritish Dail

petent piece of work, and forms a valu

ly Scots

n to that wonderfully entertaining and instruc

OMSON, by W

ly News

esting record of the conditions under which he rose to fame, as als

ature

rship of "Rule Britannia" is sustained by his count

hers' Circ

omson will welcome, and which students o

ectato

st written volumes of the useful seri

K, by T. Ban

s Mercur

c one, but a vivid chapter in the romance of Africa. Geography has no more wond

eaker

story of Mungo Park's heroic wanderings and the se

rnock Her

powerfully told, of one of

tional Ne

e summarised in such a manner

ME, by Henr

eaker

virile recruit of the

is both pictures

w Age

the fact that it is the last piece of work done by its lamented author; and very pleasing it is to note the fairness and charity

otsman

hat of presenting in clear, fair, and concise lines Hume and h

hers' Circ

no doubt be considered, as it really is, on

NBAR, by Olip

eaker

the almost Shakespearian range of his gifts. He contends that in elegy, as well as in satire and a

gow Hera

f the critical research undertaken by Laing, Schipper, and the other scholars who during the pre

ailie

he man and his works, but of his immediate en

okman

raphy, one of the liveliest an

WALLACE, by Pro

eaker

and discriminative labour he has pieced together by far the best, one m

allace in the

acquitted himself of hi

al rea

ly News

volume, one of the best yet publis

Mall Gaze

of the Tweed, and also among those Scottish exiles who

w Age

tale to tell-recorded with a painstaking research and in a spirit

TEVENSON, by Marg

shire Jou

ness, and the literary criticisms with which the book is pleasantly studded are alike

okman

ook is sure to

eaker

hese pages, as well as knowledg

tlook

s. The writer has style, sympathy, distinction, and understanding. We w

Free Pre

shed as the latest number of the "Famous Scots Series"-"R. Louis Stevenson," by Miss Black. The excellence of the littl

by Professor C

ritish Dail

ppreciation and of succin

otsman

owed to be a distinct want in our literature, in the shape of a brief, popular, and accessible biography of the founder of the so-called Scottish Sc

gow Hera

ife and estimate of Reid by Professor Campbell Fraser. The writer is no amateur, but a past-master in the subject of Scottish philosophy, and it has

Mall Gaze

-comprehensive in view, dear in exposi

rday Rev

t little book on Reid and his philosophy, dealing lucidly with the phil

AYTOUN, by R

ectato

nceived and gracefully written o

gow Hera

asson with intelligence and spirit, and the volume

, by Hector C

eaker

which is in keeping with its convictions. It has vision, too, and

cho s

riticism interspersed amidst the chapters on the philosopher's two principal treatis

s Pictor

est of an adm

ert Spen

alistic character of his teaching. It is well that his authority on the side of individualism should be put forward in these days of rampant Socialism, when the great mass of legislative measures exten

gow Hera

timate of Smith in his essential character as the author of the doctri

VILLE, by Wil

ectato

ewhat obscure period with which it is well to be acquai

eaker

has been said that the European renown of the Scottish Universities began with Melvi

ritish Dail

t. He displays a full and accurate knowledge of the ecclesiastical history of the period, an

ish Week

h history, and also with what is equally important

ademy

lville's story with a ca

ICK FERRIER, by

otsman

rofessor, Miss Haldane brings near to us

Mall Gaze

arm was so fascinating, that a study of the man must engage the sympathies of every student. The author, who is al

THE BRUCE, by P

ing Lead

t only Scots, but every man who can appreciate a re

een Journ

interest of a novel. Professor Murison is a most impartial and thoroughly reliable critic, and may be fol

s Mercur

necessary, addition to

eaker

es the value of the book: it is a fresh, independent, critical estimate of a man who emancipated Scotland from a thraldom which was almost worse than death. Br

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t only Scots, but every man who can appreciate a re

ETTRICK SHEPHERD, b

otsman

ps of Hogg through the shadow and sunshine, the failures and successes of his career, from the hillsides of Yarrow and Ettrick to the more slippery places of the world of literature, an

w Age

ll, careful, discrimina

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ttle with poverty, and of his literary achievem

itory Tim

is written in a pleasant gossipy manner, quite as if Hogg h

Andrew

and interesting volume will be welcomed by the Sco

BELL, by J. Cu

otsman

ed, and well-written account of Camp

riber'

are retained. Minor changes to punctuation, in the index

een moved to the

YOUNG SIMPSON, by Eve Blantyre Simpson, "su