ver equal.

If the "scholar" stopped in a town, his hostess probably begged of him a
charm against toothache or rheumatism. The penniless knight discoursed
with him on alchemy, and the chances of retrieving his fortune by the art
of transmuting metals into gold. The queen or bishop worried him in
private about casting their nativities, and finding their fates among the
stars. But the statesman, who dealt with more practical matters, hired
him as an advocate and rhetorician, who could fight his master's enemies
with the weapons of Demosthenes and Cicero. Wherever the scholar's steps
were turned, he might be master of others, as long as he was master of
himself. The complaints which he so often uttered concerning the cruelty
of fortune, the fickleness of princes, and so forth, were probably no
more just then than such complaints are now. Then, as now, he got his
deserts; and the world bought him at his own price. If he chose to sell
himself to this patron and to that, he was used and thrown away: if he
chose to remain in honourable independence, he was courted and feared.

Among the successful scholars of the sixteenth century, none surely is
more notable than George Buchanan. The poor Scotch widow's son, by force
of native wit, and, as I think, by force of native worth, fights his way
upward, through poverty and severest persecution, to become the
correspondent and friend of the greatest literary celebrities of the
Continent, comparable, in their opinion, to the best Latin poets of
antiquity; the preceptor of princes; the counsellor and spokesman of
Scotch statesmen in the most dangerous of times; and leaves behind him
political treatises, which have influenced not only the history of his
own country, but that of the civilised world.

Such a success could not be attained without making enemies, perhaps
without making mistakes. But the more we study George Buchanan's
history, the less we shall be inclined to hunt out his failings, the more
inclined to admire his worth. A shrewd, sound-hearted, affectionate man,
with a strong love of right and scorn of wrong, and a humour withal which
saved him--except on really great occasions--from bitterness, and helped
him to laugh where narrower natures would have only snarled,--he is, in
many respects, a type of those Lowland Scots, who long preserved his
jokes, genuine or reputed, as a common household book. {328} A
schoolmaster by profession, and struggling for long yea