examining affairs, so that no man's authority can have much weight with
him unless it be confirmed by probable reasons." Buchanan may have
thought that nine years of his stern rule had eradicated some of James's
ill conditions; the petulance which made him kill the Master of Mar's
sparrow, in trying to wrest it out of his hand; the carelessness with
which--if the story told by Chytraeus, on the authority of Buchanan's
nephew, be true--James signed away his crown to Buchanan for fifteen
days, and only discovered his mistake by seeing Bachanan act in open
court the character of King of Scots. Buchanan had at last made him a
scholar; he may have fancied that he had made him likewise a manful man:
yet he may have dreaded that, as James grew up, the old inclinations
would return in stronger and uglier shapes, and that flattery might be,
as it was after all, the cause of James's moral ruin. He at least will
be no flatterer. He opens the dialogue which he sends to the king, with
a calm but distinct assertion of his mother's guilt, and a justification
of the conduct of men who were now most of them past helping Buchanan,
for they were laid in their graves; and then goes on to argue fairly, but
to lay down firmly, in a sort of Socratic dialogue, those very principles
by loyalty to which the House of Hanover has reigned, and will reign,
over these realms. So with his History of Scotland; later antiquarian
researches have destroyed the value of the earlier portions of it: but
they have surely increased the value of those later portions, in which
Buchanan inserted so much which he had already spoken out in his
Detection of Mary. In that book also _liberavit animam suam_; he spoke
his mind fearless of consequences, in the face of a king who he must have
known--for Buchanan was no dullard--regarded him with deep dislike, who
might in a few years be able to work his ruin.

But those few years were not given to Buchanan. He had all but done his
work, and he hastened to get it over before the night should come wherein
no man can work. One must be excused for telling--one would not tell it
in a book intended to be read only by Scotsmen, who know or ought to know
the tale already--how the two Melvilles and Buchanan's nephew Thomas went
to see him in Edinburgh, in September, 1581, hearing that he was ill, and
his History still in the press; and how they found the old sage, true to
his schoolmaster's instincts, teaching the Hornbook t