y than befitted men so
pious in the opinion of the people." So Buchanan himself puts it: but,
to do the poor friars justice, they must have been angels, not men, if
they did not writhe somewhat under the scourge which he had laid on them.
To be told that there was hardly a place in heaven for monks, was hard to
hear and bear. They accused him to the king of heresy: but not being
then in favour with James, they got no answer, and Buchanan was commanded
to repeat the castigation. Having found out that the friars were not to
be touched with impunity, he wrote, he says, a short and ambiguous poem.
But the king, who loved a joke, demanded something sharp and stinging,
and Buchanan obeyed by writing, but not publishing, the 'Franciscans,' a
long satire, compared to which the 'Somnium' was bland and merciful. The
storm rose. Cardinal Beaton, Buchanan says, wanted to buy him of the
king, and then, of course, burn him, as he had just burnt five poor
souls: so, knowing James's avarice, he fled to England, through
freebooters and pestilence.

There he found, he says, "men of both factions being burned on the same
day and in the same fire"--a pardonable exaggeration--"by Henry VIII., in
his old age more intent on his own safety than on the purity of
religion." So to his beloved France he went again, to find his enemy
Beaton ambassador at Paris. The capital was too hot to hold him; and he
fled south to Bourdeaux, to Andrea Govea, the Portuguese principal of the
College of Gruienne. As Professor of Latin at Bourdeaux, we find him
presenting a Latin poem to Charles V.; and indulging that fancy of his
for Latin poetry which seems to us now-a-days a childish pedantry; which
was then--when Latin was the vernacular tongue of all scholars--a
serious, if not altogether a useful, pursuit. Of his tragedies, so
famous in their day--the 'Baptist,' the 'Medea,' the 'Jephtha,' and the
'Alcestis'--there is neither space nor need to speak here, save to notice
the bold declamations in the 'Baptist' against tyranny and priestcraft;
and to notice also that these tragedies gained for the poor Scotsman, in
the eyes of the best scholars of Europe, a credit amounting almost to
veneration. When he returned to Paris, he found occupation at once;
and--as his Scots biographers love to record--"three of the most learned
men in the world taught humanity in the same college," viz., Turnebus,
Muretus, and Buchanan.

Then followed a strange episode in h