ain in completeness if we
cast even but a transient glance, first at the former and then at the
latter class of these products.

In Scotland the studies connected with classical antiquity were
prosecuted with as much zeal as anywhere else in Europe; not however
in order to imitate its forms in the native idiom, which no one at
that time even in Germany thought of doing, but in order to use it in
learned theological controversies, and to maintain connexion with
brother Protestants of other tongues. S. Andrew's was at one time a
centre for Protestant learning: Poles and Danes, Germans and French
visited this university in order to study under Melville. Even Latin
verse was written with a certain elegance. A fit monument of these
studies and their direction is to be found in Buchanan's History of
Scotland, a work without value for the earlier period, and full of
party spirit in describing his own, as Buchanan is one of the most
violent accusers of Mary Stuart, but pervaded by that warmth and
decision which carry the reader along with it: at that time it was
read all over the world. Buchanan and Melville were among the
champions of popular ideas on the constitution of states and the
relations between sovereign and people. It cannot be affirmed that
classical studies were without influence upon their views, but the
doctrine to which they adhered grew out of a different root. It rests
historically upon the doctrine of the superiority of the Church, and
the councils representing the Church, over the Papacy, as it was put
forth in the fifteenth century at Paris. A Scottish student there,
John Major, made this doctrine his own, and after his return to his
native country, when he himself had obtained a professorship, he
applied it to temporal relations. The positions of the advocates of
the councils affirmed that the Pope, it was true, received his
authority from God, but that he might be again deprived of it in cases
of urgent necessity by the Church, which virtually included the sum of
all authority in itself. In the same way John Major taught that an
original power transmitted from father to son pertained to kings, but
that the fundamental authority resided in the people; so that a king
mischievous to the commonwealth, who showed himself incorrigible,
might be deposed again. His scholars, who took so large a part in the
first disturbances in Scotland, and their scholars in turn, firmly
maintained this doctrine. They differed