warily as
a man who had a mind to his own weal by keeping of his majesty's
favour"--"but Mr. George," adds the historian, "was a Stoick philosopher
who looked not far before him." He "held the king in great awe," so that
James "even trembled" as he himself says elsewhere, "at his approach,"
and did not spare either rod or word in the interests of his pupil. Some
of the anecdotes of this severe impartiality are amusing enough. At one
time annoyed by the noise which the King and his playfellows were
making, Buchanan bade them be silent under certain penalties if the
offence were repeated, and provoked by a childish impertinence from
James, took up the little culprit and whipped him with exemplary
impartiality, notwithstanding that his companion, the little Master of
Mar, stood by, on whom vicarious chastisement might have been applied.
Lady Mar, rushing to the scene of action at the sound of "the wailing
which ensued," took the child from his master's hands and consoled him
in her motherly arms, asking Buchanan indignantly how he dared to touch
the Lord's anointed. The incident is very natural and amusing in its
homely simplicity; the child crying, the lady soothing him, the sardonic
old master in his furred nightgown and velvet cap, looking on unmoved,
bidding her kiss the place to make it well. The Master of Mar no doubt
would cry too for sympathy, and the old gentleman take up his big book
and move off to seek a quieter place for study. On another occasion,
when the little King tried to get a sparrow from his companion and
crushed the bird in the struggle, Buchanan rated him as himself a bird
out of a bloody nest. He was an old man and alone in the world,
indifferent to future favours from a king whose reign he would probably
not live to see, and treating him with impartial justice.

There was, however, no indifference to James's education in this austere
simplicity: indeed it would seem that Buchanan, like other preceptors of
monarchs, had some hope of forming an ideal prince out of the boy. A few
years after his appointment to his office, and when James was still too
young to profit by it, he began to write his famous treatise, in the
form of a dialogue, upon the laws of the kingdom, the duty respectively
of kings and subjects. The _De Jure Regni_, published when the King was
about twelve, was dedicated to him in a grave and dignified letter in
which Buchanan describes his work as an attempt to expound the
prerogativ