ough a false
quantity as if he were cutting down an enemy? Thomas Jack has departed
into oblivion along with his _Onomasticon_: but this record of the
friendly reception he and his book met with affords a delightful gleam
of light upon the historian's waning days.

It is more remarkable when we find another witness describing our
somewhat irascible and sharp philosopher as growing young again in the
boys who surrounded him, and adapting his mind to all ages and classes
of men. Probably by the time he came to be the King's preceptor Buchanan
had ceased to be so compliant, or very probably conceived it
appropriate, on principle, to be less indulgent to a pupil whose danger
it would be to have too many flatteries and caresses.

We have no very clear record when it was that the tutelage of James was
supposed to be over, or if Buchanan was ever formally freed from his
office. Informally the King would have seemed to be more or less his own
master at the end of Morton's Regency, when, though subject to "raids"
like that of Gowrie and the contending influence of one party after
another, there was no longer any Regent thought of, and the business of
the country was conducted formally in the King's name. It would seem,
however, from the dedication of the History, that Buchanan had ceased
for some time before its publication to take an active part in James's
education. He speaks in this of "the incurable illness" which made him
incapable of "discharging the office entrusted to me of cultivating the
genius" of the young King; and presents the book as making up in some
degree for that personal failure. The History ends with the death of the
Regent Lennox, he who was killed in Stirling almost under the
historian's eyes, and when Scotland was still distracted between two
parties, and in a state of civil warfare. It has been made a subject of
reproach to Buchanan that he stopped his chronicle before the beginning
of the Regency of Morton, because of his personal hatred to that brave
and able personage--a singular charge, seeing that Buchanan lived only a
few months after the last Regent of Scotland; and he has expressly
mentioned in one of his dedications the increased tranquillity which was
the result of Morton's government.

It is in Edinburgh we find the old man of letters in the last scene of
his long and laborious life. In September 1581 he was visited by three
gentlemen from St. Andrews, one of whom gives us the most lifelike