o his servant-lad;
and how he told them that doing that was "better than stealing sheep, or
sitting idle, which was as bad," and showed them that dedication to James
I., in which he holds up to his imitation as a hero whose equal was
hardly to be found in history, that very King David whose liberality to
the Romish Church provoked James's witticism that "David was a sair saint
for the crown." Andrew Melville, so James Melville says, found fault
with the style. Buchanan replied that he could do no more for thinking
of another thing, which was to die. They then went to Arbuthnot's
printing-house, and inspected the history, as far as that terrible
passage concerning Rizzio's burial, where Mary is represented as "laying
the miscreant almost in the arms of Maud de Valois, the late queen."
Alarmed, and not without reason, at such plain speaking, they stopped the
press, and went back to Buchanan's house. Buchanan was in bed. "He was
going," he said, "the way of welfare." They asked him to soften the
passage; the king might prohibit the whole work. "Tell me, man," said
Buchanan, "if I have told the truth." They could not, or would not, deny
it. "Then I will abide his feud, and all his kin's; pray, pray to God
for me, and let Him direct all." "So," says Melville, "before the
printing of his chronicle was ended, this most learned, wise, and godly
man ended his mortal life."

Camden has a hearsay story--written, it must be remembered, in James I.'s
time--that Buchanan, on his death-bed, repented of his harsh words
against Queen Mary; and an old Lady Rosyth is said to have said that when
she was young a certain David Buchanan recollected hearing some such
words from George Buchanan's own mouth. Those who will, may read what
Ruddiman and Love have said, and oversaid, on both sides of the question:
whatever conclusion they come to, it will probably not be that to which
George Chalmers comes in his life of Ruddiman: that "Buchanan, like other
liars, who, by the repetition of falsehoods are induced to consider the
fiction as truth, had so often dwelt with complacency on the forgeries of
his Detections, and the figments of his History, that he at length
regarded his fictions and his forgeries as most authentic facts."

At all events his fictions and his forgeries had not paid him in that
coin which base men generally consider the only coin worth having,
namely, the good things of this life. He left nothing behind him--if at