ft assailed,
Laying all hope of further gain aside."

In the meantime, while these poetical performances went on, and the
scholar occupied his leisure in preparing for publication his scattered
works--an occupation which of itself proved the quiet and good hope in
which he was living--more serious labours also occupied his mind.
Notwithstanding his tutorship at Court, Buchanan took advantage of the
moment to declare himself an adherent of the newly formed and very
belligerent Church, now settled and accepted on the basis of the
Reformation, but with little favour at Court as has been seen. He not
only put himself and his erudition at once on that side in the most open
and public way, but sat in the General Assembly, or at least in one of
the Assemblies which preceded the formal creation of that great
ecclesiastical parliament, in 1563, less than two years after his
arrival in Scotland. Nor was his position that of a simple member taking
part in the debates; he seems to have sat upon various special
committees, and to have been entrusted, along with several others, to
revise the Book of Discipline, the standard of order and governance: and
this while he was still a courtier, Mary's tutor and gossip, holding his
place in her presence, and celebrating the events of the time in courtly
and scholarly verse--a curious instance of toleration in a time which
scarcely knew its name.

To recompense Buchanan's services Queen Mary granted him, in the year
1564, an allowance from the forfeited Church property, making him
pensioner of the Abbey of Crossraguel, with an income of five hundred
pounds Scots--a sum very different, it need not be said, from the same
sum in English money. The abbey had been held by a Kennedy, the brother
of Buchanan's first pupil, the Earl of Cassilis, and very probably he
had thus some knowledge of and connection with the locality, where he
had gone with Cassilis many years before. The grant would seem for some
years to have profited him little, the then Earl of Cassilis, son of his
gentler Gilbert, having little inclination to let go his hold of the
rents which his uncle had drawn, either in favour of a new abbot or of
the pensioner; and the cruelties with which this fierce Ayrshire lord
treated the functionary who succeeded his uncle seem incredible to hear
of. George Buchanan kept out of his clutches; but it was not till some
years afterwards that we find the local tyrant bound over in sureties to