The scholar, in the sixteenth century, was a far more important personage than now.  The supply of learned men was very small, the demand for them very great.  During the whole of the fifteenth, and a great part of the sixteenth century, the human mind turned more and more from the scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages to that of the Romans and the Greeks; and found more and more in old Pagan Art an element which Monastic Art had not, and which was yet necessary for the full satisfaction of their craving after the Beautiful.  At such a crisis of thought and taste, it was natural that the classical scholar, the man who knew old Rome, and still more old Greece, should usurp the place of the monk, as teacher of mankind; and that scholars should form, for a while, a new and powerful aristocracy, limited and privileged, and all the more redoubtable, because its power lay in intellect, and had been won by intellect alone.

Those who, whether poor or rich, did not fear the monk and priest, at least feared the “scholar,” who held, so the vulgar believed, the keys of that magic lore by which the old necromancers had built cities like Rome, and worked marvels of mechanical and chemical skill, which the degenerate modern could never equal.

If the “scholar” stopped in a town, his hostess probably begged of him a charm against toothache or rheumatism.  The penniless knight discoursed with him on alchemy, and the chances of retrieving his fortune by the art of transmuting metals into gold.  The queen or bishop worried him in private about casting their nativities, and finding their fates among the stars.  But the statesman, who dealt with more practical matters, hired him as an advocate and rhetorician, who could fight his master’s enemies with the weapons of Demosthenes and Cicero.  Wherever the scholar’s steps were turned, he might be master of others, as long as he was master of himself.  The complaints which he so often uttered concerning the cruelty of fortune, the fickleness of princes, and so forth, were probably no more just then than such complaints are now.  Then, as now, he got his deserts; and the world bought him at his own price.  If he chose to sell himself to this patron and to that, he was used and thrown away:  if he chose to remain in honourable independence, he was courted and feared.

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.