o such reproach
rested upon us. Although perhaps, then as now, the Scotch intelligence
had a special leaning towards philosophy, there was still many a learned
Scot whose reputation was in all the universities, whose Latinity was
unexceptionable, and his erudition immense, and to whom verses were
addressed and books dedicated in every centre of letters. One of the
most distinguished of these scholars was George Buchanan, and there
could be no better type of the man of letters of his time, in whom the
liberality of the cosmopolitan was united with the exclusiveness of the
member of a very strait and limited caste. He had his correspondents in
all the cities of the Continent, and at home his closest associates were
among the highest in his own land. Yet he was the son of a very poor
man, born almost a peasant and dying nearly as poor as he was born. From
wandering scholar and pedagogue he became the preceptor of a King and
the associate of princes; but he was not less independent, and he was
scarcely more rich in the one position than the other. His pride was not
in the high consultations he shared or the national movements in which
he had his part, but in his fine Latinity and the elegant turn of those
classical lines which all his learned compeers admired and applauded.
The part that he played in history has been made to look odious by
skilled critics; and the great book in which he recorded the deeds of
his contemporaries and predecessors has been assailed violently and
bitterly as prejudiced, partial, and untrue. But nobody has been able to
attack his Latin or impair the renown of his scholarship; and perhaps
had he himself chosen the foundation on which to build his fame, this is
what he would have preferred above all. History may come and politics
go, and the principles of both may change with the generations, but
Latin verse goes on for ever: no false ingenuity of criticism can pick
holes in the deathless structure of an art with which living principles
have had nothing to do for a thousand years and more.

Buchanan was born in a farmhouse, "a lowly cottage thatched with straw,"
in the year 1506, in Killearn in the county of Stirling; but not without
gentle blood in his veins, the gentility so much prized in Scotland,
which makes a traceable descent even from the roughest of country lairds
a matter of distinction. His mother was a Heriot, and one wonders
whether there might not be some connection between the great s