And that the genius was there, no man can doubt; one cannot read that “hideously eloquent” description of Kirk o’ Field, which Mr. Burton has well chosen as a specimen of Buchanan’s style, without seeing that we are face to face with a genius of a very lofty order:  not, indeed, of the loftiest—­for there is always in Buchanan’s work, it seems to me, a want of unconsciousness, and a want of tenderness—­but still a genius worthy to be placed beside those ancient writers from whom he took his manner.  Whether or not we agree with his contemporaries, who say that he equalled Virgil in Latin poetry, we may place him fairly as a prose writer by the side of Demosthenes, Cicero, or Tacitus.  And so I pass from this painful subject; only quoting—­if I may be permitted to quote—­Mr. Burton’s wise and gentle verdict on the whole.  “Buchanan,” he says, “though a zealous Protestant, had a good deal of the Catholic and sceptical spirit of Erasmus, and an admiring eye for everything that was great and beautiful.  Like the rest of his countrymen, he bowed himself in presence of the lustre that surrounded the early career of his mistress.  More than once he expressed his pride and reverence in the inspiration of a genius deemed by his contemporaries to be worthy of the theme.  There is not, perhaps, to be found elsewhere in literature so solemn a memorial of shipwrecked hopes, of a sunny opening and a stormy end, as one finds in turning the leaves of the volume which contains the beautiful epigram ‘Nympha Caledoniae’ in one part, the ‘Detectio Mariae Reginae’ in another; and this contrast is, no doubt, a faithful parallel of the reaction in the popular mind.  This reaction seems to have been general, and not limited to the Protestant party; for the conditions under which it became almost a part of the creed of the Church of Rome to believe in her innocence had not arisen.”

If Buchanan, as some of his detractors have thought, raised himself by subserviency to the intrigues of the Regent Murray, the best heads in Scotland seem to have been of a different opinion.  The murder of Murray did not involve Buchanan’s fall.  He had avenged it, as far as pen could do it, by that “Admonition Direct to the Trew Lordis,” in which he showed himself as great a master of Scottish, as he was of Latin prose.  His satire of the “Chameleon,” though its publication was stopped by Maitland, must have been read in manuscript by many of those same “True Lords;” and though there were nobler instincts in Maitland than any Buchanan gave him credit for, the satire breathed an honest indignation against that wily turncoat’s misgoings, which could not but recommend the author to all honest men.  Therefore it was, I presume, and not because he was a rogue, and a hired literary spadassin, that to the best heads in Scotland he seemed so useful, it may be so worthy, a man, that he be provided with continually increasing employment.  As tutor to James I.; as director, for a short time,