evidence that ingratitude, as one of them says, "was the great and
unpardonable blemish of his life"--by the epigram in question, in which
he distinguishes his professor as "solo cognomine Major." It might very
well be, however, that Buchanan expected a kind recommendation from his
St. Andrews master, such as the habit of the kindly Scots was apt to
give, and some help perhaps in procuring employment, and that the
failure of any aid of this description betrayed the youth into the
national tendency to harshness of speech and the bitter jeer at one who
was great only in his name.

A stranger with nothing but his learning and his Latin epigrams (though
these last were a more marketable commodity then than now) would no
doubt be forlorn enough, struggling to find himself standing-ground and
a living, subsisting hardly on what chance employment might fall in his
way, and reflecting, as most adventurers are apt to do, how easy it
would be for his prosperous countryman to befriend him. Paris, always
full of stir and commotion, had at this moment a new source of agitation
in the rising force of the Reformation principles or, as Buchanan calls
it, "the Lutheran controversy, which was already spreading far and
wide," and into the midst of which he fell on his return. Whether his
interest in the new creed did him harm in his search for an
establishment we are not told: and probably the "struggle with adverse
fortune for about two years" which he records was merely the difficulty
in making himself known which affects every young man. At the end of
that time he got an appointment in the College of St. Barbe as Professor
of Grammar, and was henceforward exempted at least from the
heart-sickening conflict with absolute poverty.

Buchanan would seem to have had already high ambitions and a certainty
that he was fit for something better than the post of schoolmaster in a
French college--for notwithstanding his eagerness to get this post we
soon find him lamenting, in the abstract indeed, but in a manner too
particular to be without special meaning, the small profit of
intellectual labour and the weariness of a continual toil which was so
little rewarded. His plaint of the long night's work, the burning of the
midnight oil, the hunt through dusty and rotting manuscripts, seems
touched with a tone of bitterness unusual in the student's murmurs over
a lot which after all brings him as much pleasure as weariness. The
ambitious lad was alr