cruel life George had. Within two years he was down in a severe
illness, his uncle dead, his supplies stopped; and the boy of sixteen got
home, he does not tell how. Then he tried soldiering; and was with
Albany's French Auxiliaries at the ineffectual attack on Wark Castle.
Marching back through deep snow, he got a fresh illness, which kept him
in bed all winter. Then he and his brother were sent to St. Andrew's,
where he got his B.A. at nineteen. The next summer he went to France
once more; and "fell," he says, "into the flames of the Lutheran sect,
which was then spreading far and wide." Two years of penury followed;
and then three years of schoolmastering in the College of St. Barbe,
which he has immortalised--at least for the few who care to read modern
Latin poetry--in his elegy on 'The Miseries of a Parisian Teacher of the
Humanities.' The wretched regent master, pale and suffering, sits up all
night preparing his lecture, biting his nails, and thumping his desk; and
falls asleep for a few minutes, to start up at the sound of the four
o'clock bell, and be in school by five, his Virgil in one hand, and his
rod in the other, trying to do work on his own account at old
manuscripts, and bawling all the while at his wretched boys, who cheat
him, and pay each other to answer to truants' names. The class is all
wrong. "One is barefoot, another's shoe is burst, another cries, another
writes home. Then comes the rod, the sound of blows and howls; and the
day passes in tears." "Then mass, then another lesson, then more blows;
there is hardly time to eat."--I have no space to finish the picture of
the stupid misery which, Buchanan says, was ruining his intellect, while
it starved his body. However, happier days came. Gilbert Kennedy, Earl
of Cassilis, who seems to have been a noble young gentleman, took him as
his tutor for the next five years; and with him he went back to Scotland.

But there his plain speaking got him, as it did more than once afterward,
into trouble. He took it into his head to write, in imitation of Dunbar,
a Latin poem, in which St. Francis asks him in a dream to become a Grey
Friar, and Buchanan answered in language which had the unpleasant fault
of being too clever, and--to judge from contemporary evidence--only too
true. The friars said nothing at first: but when King James made
Buchanan tutor to one of his natural sons, they, "men professing
meekness, took the matter somewhat more angril