and will reign, over these realms.  So with his History of Scotland; later antiquarian researches have destroyed the value of the earlier portions of it:  but they have surely increased the value of those later portions, in which Buchanan inserted so much which he had already spoken out in his Detection of Mary.  In that book also, “liberavit animam suam;” he spoke his mind, fearless of consequences, in the face of a king who he must have known—­for Buchanan was no dullard—­regarded him with deep dislike, who might in a few years be able to work his ruin.

But those few years were not given to Buchanan.  He had all but done his work, and he hastened to get it over before the night should come wherein no man can work.  One must be excused for telling—­one would not tell it in a book intended to be read only by Scotchmen, who know or ought to know the tale already—­how the two Melvilles and Buchanan’s nephew Thomas went to see him in Edinburgh, in September, 1581, hearing that he was ill, and his History still in the press; and how they found the old sage, true to his schoolmaster’s instincts, teaching the Hornbook to his servant-lad; and how he told them that doing that was “better than stealing sheep, or sitting idle, which was as bad,” and showed them that dedication to James I., in which he holds up to his imitation as a hero whose equal was hardly to be found in history, that very King David whose liberality to the Romish Church provoked James’s witticism that “David was a sair saint for the crown.”  Andrew Melville, so James Melville says, found fault with the style.  Buchanan replied that he could do no more for thinking of another thing, which was to die.  They then went to Arbuthnot’s printing-house, and inspected the history, as far as that terrible passage concerning Rizzio’s burial, where Mary is represented as “laying the miscreant almost in the arms of Maud de Valois, the late queen.”  Alarmed, and not without reason, at such plain speaking, they stopped the press, and went back to Buchanan’s house.  Buchanan was in bed.  “He was going,” he said, “the way of welfare.”  They asked him to soften the passage; the king might prohibit the whole work.  “Tell me, man,” said Buchanan, “if I have told the truth.”  They could not, or would not, deny it.  “Then I will abide his feud, and all his kin’s; pray, pray to God for me, and let Him direct all.”  “So,” says Melville, “by the printing of his chronicle was ended, this most learned, wise, and godly man ended his mortal life.”

Camden has a hearsay story—­written, it must be remembered, in James I.’s time—­that Buchanan, on his death-bed repented of his harsh words against Queen Mary; and an old Lady Rosyth is said to have said that when she was young a certain David Buchanan recollected hearing some such words from George Buchanan’s own mouth.  Those who will, may read what Ruddiman and Love have said, and oversaid, on both sides of the question:  whatever conclusion they come to, it will probably not be that to which George Chalmers comes in his life of Ruddiman:  that “Buchanan, like other liars, who by the repetition of falsehoods are induced to consider the fiction as truth, had so often dwelt with complacency on the forgeries of his Detections, and the figments of his History, that he at length regarded his fictions and his forgeries as most authentic facts.”