But there his plain speaking got him, as it did more than once afterward, into trouble.  He took it into his head to write, in imitation of Dunbar, a Latin poem, in which St. Francis asks him in a dream to become a Gray Friar, and Buchanan answered in language which had the unpleasant fault of being too clever, and—­to judge from contemporary evidence—­only too true.  The friars said nothing at first; but when King James made Buchanan tutor to one of his natural sons, they, “men professing meekness, took the matter somewhat more angrily than befitted men so pious in the opinion of the people.”  So Buchanan himself puts it:  but, to do the poor friars justice, they must have been angels, not men, if they did not writhe somewhat under the scourge which he had laid on them.  To be told that there was hardly a place in heaven for monks, was hard to hear and bear.  They accused him to the king of heresy; but not being then in favour with James, they got no answer, and Buchanan was commanded to repeat the castigation.  Having found out that the friars were not to be touched with impunity, he wrote, he says, a short and ambiguous poem.  But the king, who loved a joke, demanded something sharp and stinging, and Buchanan obeyed by writing, but not publishing, “The Franciscans,” a long satire, compared to which the “Somnium” was bland and merciful.  The storm rose.  Cardinal Beaten, Buchanan says, wanted to buy him of the king, and then, of course, burn him, as he had just burnt five poor souls; so, knowing James’s avarice, he fled to England, through freebooters and pestilence.

There he found, he says, “men of both factions being burned on the same day and in the same fire”—­a pardonable exaggeration—­“by Henry VIII., in his old age more intent on his own safety than on the purity of religion.”  So to his beloved France he went again, to find his enemy Beaten ambassador at Paris.  The capital was too hot to hold him; and he fled south to Bordeaux, to Andrea Govea, the Portuguese principal of the College of Guienne.  As Professor of Latin at Bordeaux, we find him presenting a Latin poem to Charles V.; and indulging that fancy of his for Latin poetry which seems to us nowadays a childish pedantry, which was then—­when Latin was the vernacular tongue of all scholars—­a serious, if not altogether a useful, pursuit.  Of his tragedies, so famous in their day—­the “Baptist,” the “Medea,” the “Jephtha,” and the “Alcestis”—­there is neither space nor need to speak here, save to notice the bold declamations in the “Baptist” against tyranny and priestcraft; and to notice also that these tragedies gained for the poor Scotsman, in the eyes of the best scholars of Europe, a credit amounting almost to veneration.  When he returned to Paris, he found occupation at once; and, as his Scots biographers love to record, “three of the most learned men in the world taught humanity in the same college,” viz.  Turnebus, Muretus, and Buchanan.