dant. When Milton speaks of the
"others," poets whom he thus adopts into a kind of equality, who "use"

"To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair,"

it is supposed to be Buchanan whom he refers to, which is perhaps honour
enough for a modern classicist; though Amaryllis, the critics say, was
no more individual a love than the Lutetia before mentioned, for whom he
pined. Yet though all the scholars of his time admired and followed him,
he had to return again and again to his Latin grammar, and to small boys
not so wonderful as Michel of Montaigne; and when he returned to
Edinburgh at the age of fifty-five his worldly position was scarcely
better than when he got his first appointment at twenty-one to the
College of St. Barbe. His life was now, however, to take another form.

Buchanan's return to Scotland "after the despotism of the Guises was
over" corresponded very nearly with the return of Queen Mary. It is
surmised that he may have travelled in the suite of "the Lord James,"
the future Earl of Murray, who paid his sister a visit very soon after
the death of her husband, King Francis: certainly nothing could be more
probable than that the Scotch scholar, seeking an opportunity to return
to his native country, should have joined himself to the train of the
prince, who probably had been acquainted in his childhood with his
brother's tutor, and who was himself a man of education and a patron of
literature. If this guess should be correct it would account for
Buchanan's rapid promotion to Court favour. Edinburgh was in a state of
happy expectation when the poet came back. What was virtually a new
reign, though Mary had been the nominal possessor of the throne from her
birth, was about to begin; the fame of the young Queen had no doubt been
blown far and wide about the country on every breeze--that fame of
beauty, sweetness, and grace which is the most universally attractive of
all reputations, and which made the proud Scots prouder still in the
possession of such a prodigy. That there were graver thoughts among the
very serious and important party, who felt the safety of their
newly-established and severely-reformed Church to be in doubt if not in
danger, and who hated and feared "the mass" and the priests who
performed it as they did the devil (with whom indeed they were more
amiably familiar), does not alter the fact that the anticipation of
Mary's return was a happy one, and h