Among the successful scholars of the sixteenth century, none surely is more notable than George Buchanan.  The poor Scotch widow’s son, by force of native wit, and, as I think, by force of native worth, fights his way upward, through poverty and severest persecution, to become the correspondent and friend of the greatest literary celebrities of the Continent, comparable, in their opinion, to the best Latin poets of antiquity; the preceptor of princes; the counsellor and spokesman of Scotch statesmen in the most dangerous of times; and leaves behind him political treatises, which have influenced not only the history of his own country, but that of the civilised world.

Such a success could not be attained without making enemies, perhaps without making mistakes.  But the more we study George Buchanan’s history, the less we shall be inclined to hunt out his failings, the more inclined to admire his worth.  A shrewd, sound-hearted, affectionate man, with a strong love of right and scorn of wrong, and a humour withal which saved him—­except on really great occasions—­from bitterness, and helped him to laugh where narrower natures would have only snarled,—­he is, in many respects, a type of those Lowland Scots, who long preserved his jokes, genuine or reputed, as a common household book. {16} A schoolmaster by profession, and struggling for long years amid the temptations which, in those days, degraded his class into cruel and sordid pedants, he rose from the mere pedagogue to be, in the best sense of the word, a courtier:  “One,” says Daniel Heinsius, “who seemed not only born for a court, but born to amend it.  He brought to his queen that at which she could not wonder enough.  For, by affecting a certain liberty in censuring morals, he avoided all offence, under the cloak of simplicity.”  Of him and his compeers, Turnebus, and Muretus, and their friend Andrea Govea, Ronsard, the French court poet, said that they had nothing of the pedagogue about them but the gown and cap.  “Austere in face, and rustic in his looks,” says David Buchanan, “but most polished in style and speech; and continually, even in serious conversation, jesting most wittily.”  “Rough-hewn, slovenly, and rude,” says Peacham, in his “Compleat Gentleman,” speaking of him, probably, as he appeared in old age, “in his person, behaviour, and fashion; seldom caring for a better outside than a rugge-gown girt close about him:  yet his inside and conceipt in poesie was most rich, and his sweetness and facilitie in verse most excellent.”  A typical Lowland Scot, as I said just now, he seems to have absorbed all the best culture which France could afford him, without losing the strength, honesty, and humour which he inherited from his Stirlingshire kindred.