rs amid the
temptations which, in those days, degraded his class into cruel and
sordid pedants, he rose from the mere pedagogue to be, in the best sense
of the word, a courtier; "One," says Daniel Heinsius, "who seemed not
only born for a court, but born to amend it. He brought to his queen
that at which she could not wonder enough. For, by affecting a certain
liberty in censuring morals, he avoided all offence, under the cloak of
simplicity." Of him and his compeers, Turnebus, and Muretus, and their
friend Andrea Govea, Ronsard, the French court poet, said that they had
nothing of the pedagogue about them but the gown and cap. "Austere in
face, and rustic in his looks," says David Buchanan, "but most polished
in style and speech; and continually, even in serious conversation,
jesting most wittily." "Roughhewn, slovenly, and rude," says Peacham, in
his 'Compleat Gentleman,' speaking of him, probably, as he appeared in
old age, "in his person, behaviour, and fashion; seldom caring for a
better outside than a rugge-gown girt close about him: yet his inside and
conceipt in poesie was most rich, and his sweetness and facilitie in
verse most excellent." A typical Lowland Scot, as I said just now, he
seems to have absorbed all the best culture which France could afford
him, without losing the strength, honesty, and humour which he inherited
from his Stirlingshire kindred.

The story of his life is easily traced. When an old man, he himself
wrote down the main events of it, at the request of his friends; and his
sketch has been filled out by commentators, if not always favourable, at
least erudite. Born in 1506, at the Moss, in Killearn--where an obelisk
to his memory, so one reads, has been erected in this century--of a
family "rather ancient than rich," his father dead in the prime of
manhood, his grandfather a spendthrift, he and his seven brothers and
sisters were brought up by a widowed mother, Agnes Heriot--of whom one
wishes to know more; for the rule that great sons have great mothers
probably holds good in her case. George gave signs, while at the village
school, of future scholarship; and when he was only fourteen, his uncle
James sent him to the University of Paris. Those were hard times; and
the youths, or rather boys, who meant to become scholars, had a cruel
life of it, cast desperately out on the wide world to beg and starve,
either into self-restraint and success, or into ruin of body and soul.
And a