is life. A university had been
founded at Coimbra, in Portugal, and Andrea Govea had been invited to
bring thither what French savans he could collect. Buchanan went to
Portugal with his brother Patrick; two more Scotsmen, Dempster and
Ramsay: and a goodly company of French scholars, whose names and
histories may be read in the erudite pages of Dr. Irving, went likewise.
All prospered in the new Temple of the Muses for a year or so. Then its
high-priest, Govea, died; and, by a peripeteia too common in those days
and countries, Buchanan and two of his friends migrated, unwillingly,
from the Temple of the Muses for that of Moloch, and found themselves in
the Inquisition.

Buchanan, it seems, had said that St. Augustine was more of a Lutheran
than a Catholic on the question of the mass. He and his friends had
eaten flesh in Lent; which, he says, almost everyone in Spain did. But
he was suspected, and with reason, as a heretic; the Grey Friars formed
but one brotherhood throughout Europe; and news among them travelled
surely if not fast: so that the story of the satire written in Scotland
had reached Portugal. The culprits were imprisoned, examined,
bullied--but not tortured--for a year and a half. At the end of that
time, the proofs of heresy, it seems, were insufficient; but lest--says
Buchanan with honest pride--"they should get the reputation of having
vainly tormented a man not altogether unknown," they sent him for some
months to a monastery, to be instructed by the monks. "The men," he
says, "were neither inhuman nor bad, but utterly ignorant of religion;"
and Buchanan solaced himself during the intervals of their instructions,
by beginning his Latin translation of the Psalms.

At last he got free, and begged leave to return to France; but in vain.
Wearied out at last, he got on board a Candian ship at Lisbon, and
escaped to England. But England, he says, during the anarchy of Edward
VI.'s reign, was not a land which suited him; and he returned to his
beloved France, to fulfil the hopes which he had expressed in his
charming 'Desiderium Lutitiae,' and the still more charming, because more
simple, 'Adventus in Galliam,' in which he bids farewell, in most
melodious verse, to "the hungry moors of wretched Portugal, and her clods
fertile in naught but penury."

Some seven years succeeded of schoolmastering and verse-writing:--The
Latin paraphrase of the Psalms; another of the 'Alcestis' of Euripides;
an Epith