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 Beaton, 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 Beaton ambassador at Paris.  The capital was too hot to hold him; and he fled south to Bourdeaux, to Andrea Govea, the Portuguese principal of the College of Gruienne.  As Professor of Latin at Bourdeaux, we find him presenting a Latin poem to Charles V.; and indulging that fancy of his for Latin poetry which seems to us now-a-days 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.

Then followed a strange episode in his life.  A university had been founded at Coimbra, in Portugal, and Andrea Govea had been invited to bring thither what French savans he could collect.  Buchanan went to Portugal with his brother Patrick; two more Scotsmen, Dempster and Ramsay:  and a goodly company of French scholars, whose names and histories may be read in the erudite pages of Dr. Irving, went likewise.  All prospered in the new Temple of the Muses for a year or so.  Then its high-priest, Govea, died; and, by a peripeteia too common in those days and countries, Buchanan and two of his friends migrated, unwillingly, from the Temple of the Muses for that of Moloch, and found themselves in the Inquisition.