ous province of
Gascony seems to have been active and happy. He was Professor of Latin
in the college; perhaps the terms would be more just if we said he was
Latin master in one of the most flourishing and successful of French
schools; but our neighbours still prefer the more high-sounding
nomenclature. The great Garonne was not full of ships and trade at that
period as it is now; but Bordeaux was one of the old capital cities of
France, possessing a rank which now belongs to no French provincial
town, and had its own characteristic society, its scholars and
provincial statesmen. But the most important and notable human being of
all whom Buchanan found in his new sphere was a certain small seigneur
of Gascony, six years old, and already an accomplished Latinist, having
learned no other language from his cradle, bearing the name of Michel de
Montaigne and already a little philosopher as well as scholar. The great
essayist speaks afterwards of "George Buchanan, the celebrated Scotch
poet," as one of his masters, but he does not say whether Buchanan was
the enlightened pedagogue who connived at his endless reading and let
him off as much as was possible from other less congenial studies.

Buchanan, however, must have found the cheerful southern city, with its
Parliament and its colleges, and all the teeming life and restless
energies of the Gascon race, not unlike a kind of warmer and more
brilliant Scotland, full of national brag and gallantry, a congenial
sphere. He had been for a long time shedding complimentary verses,
sonnets, dedications, about him after the manner of the time, serving
out to everybody who was kind to him a little immortality in the shape
of classic thanks or compliment: but in Bordeaux he began to produce
works of more apparent importance, "four tragedies" intended primarily
for the use of his college, where it was the custom to represent yearly
a play, generally of an allegorical character--one of the fantastical
miracle plays which delighted the time, and which were often as profane
in reality as they were religious in pretence. The great classicist
considered his boys to be wasting their faculties in representing such
inferior performances, but humoured the prevailing taste so much as to
choose two Scriptural subjects, Jephthah and John the Baptist,
alternately with the Medea and Alcestis. He "was successful beyond his
hopes," he says, in these efforts. In all of the plays the little
Montaigne wa