that the King would be offendit with it, and it
might stay all the work. 'Tell me, man,' says he, 'gif I have told
the truth?'--'Yes,' says Mr. Thomas, 'Sir, I think so.'--'I will
bide his feud and all his kin's then;' quoth he. 'Pray, pray to God
for me, and let Him direct all.' So by the printing of his Cornicle
was endit, that maist learned, wyse, and godly man endit this mortal
life."

He was a pedagogue, perhaps something of a pedant, a hot partisan, a
special pleader; but few lives can show a more dignified and noble end.
If it was the truth he had written this old man cared for nothing else,
not even for that fame which is the last infirmity of noble minds. The
King might keep back the great work of his life, but he could not
silence the lips in which no fear of man was. Whatever might happen
afterwards, Buchanan's record was clear; to have told the truth was all
with which he had anything to do.

There is a touch of what for want of a better word we must call cynicism
in the humorous indifference with which the old philosopher is said to
have discussed his own burial. Finding, as the story goes, that there
was not money enough in the house for the last expenses, he ordered what
there was to be given to the poor, declaring that he was not concerned
as to what was to become of his remains. If they did not choose to bury
him they might let him lie, he said in grim jest. He was, however,
reverently buried by the authorities of Edinburgh, in the historical
churchyard of the Greyfriars, attended by "a great company of the
faithful," though no stone seems ever to have been placed to indicate
the spot where he was laid. Thus in some unknown corner he rests, like
so many other illustrious persons--a man who never rested in his life,
and carried down his labours to the very verge of the grave. It is a
curious satire upon human justice that his name should have been kept
green in Scotland by the rough jests of an imaginary Geordie Buchanan,
commonly supposed to have been the King's fool, as extraordinary a
travesty as it is possible to conceive. It is almost as strange a twist
of all the facts and meaning of life that the only money of which he
could be supposed to be possessed at his death should have been one
hundred pounds (Scots, no doubt), _arrears_ of the pension due to him
from the Abbey of Crossraguel, given by Queen Mary to that learned pupil
of the Sorbonne and lover of Lutetia with whom