tune, the fickleness of princes and so forth, were probably no more
just then than such complaints are now. Then, as now, he got his
deserts; and the world bought him at his own price. If he chose to sell
himself to this patron and to that, he was used and thrown away: if he
chose to remain in honourable independence, he was courted and feared.

Among the successful scholars of the sixteenth century, none surely is
more notable than George Buchanan. The poor Scotch widow's son, by force
of native wit, and, as I think, by force of native worth, fights his way
upward, through poverty and severest persecution, to become the
correspondent and friend of the greatest literary celebrities of the
Continent, comparable, in their opinion, to the best Latin poets of
antiquity; the preceptor of princes; the counsellor and spokesman of
Scotch statesmen in the most dangerous of times; and leaves behind him
political treatises, which have influenced not only the history of his
own country, but that of the civilised world.

Such a success could not be attained without making enemies, perhaps
without making mistakes. But the more we study George Buchanan's
history, the less we shall be inclined to hunt out his failings, the more
inclined to admire his worth. A shrewd, sound-hearted, affectionate man,
with a strong love of right and scorn of wrong, and a humour withal which
saved him--except on really great occasions--from bitterness, and helped
him to laugh where narrower natures would have only snarled,--he is, in
many respects, a type of those Lowland Scots, who long preserved his
jokes, genuine or reputed, as a common household book. {16} A
schoolmaster by profession, and struggling for long years 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; an