Regent Murray, the best heads in
Scotland seem to have been of a different opinion. The murder of Murray
did not involve Buchanan's fall. He had avenged it, as far as pen could
do it, by that 'Admonition Direct to the Trew Lordis,' in which he showed
himself as great a master of Scottish, as he was of Latin, prose. His
satire of the 'Chameleon,' though its publication was stopped by
Maitland, must have been read in manuscript by many of those same "True
Lords;" and though there were nobler instincts in Maitland than any
Buchanan gave him credit for, the satire breathed an honest indignation
against that wily turncoat's misdoings, which could not but recommend the
author to all honest men. Therefore it was, I presume, and not because
he was a rogue, and a hired literary spadassin, that to the best heads in
Scotland he seemed so useful, it may be so worthy, a man, that he be
provided with continually increasing employment. As tutor to James I.;
as director, for a short time, of the chancery; as keeper of the privy
seal, and privy councillor; as one of the commissioners for codifying the
laws, and again--for in the semi-anarchic state of Scotland, government
had to do everything in the way of organisation--in the committee for
promulgating a standard Latin grammar; in the committee for reforming the
University of St. Andrew's: in all these Buchanan's talents were again
and again called for; and always ready. The value of his work,
especially that for the reform of St. Andrew's, must be judged by
Scotchmen, rather than by an Englishman: but all that one knows of it
justifies Melville's sentence in the well-known passage in his memoirs,
wherein he describes the tutors and household of the young King. "Mr.
George was a Stoic philosopher, who looked not far before him;" in plain
words, a high-minded and right-minded man, bent on doing the duty which
lay nearest him. The worst that can be said against him during these
times is, that his name appears with the sum of 100 pounds against it, as
one of those "who were to be entertained in Scotland by pensions out of
England"; and Ruddiman, of course, comments on the fact by saying that
Buchanan "was at length to act under the threefold character of
malcontent, reformer, and pensioner:" but it gives no proof whatsoever
that Buchanan ever received any such bribe; and in the very month,
seemingly, in which that list was written--10th March, 1579--Buchanan had
given a proof to th