BIOGRAPHICAL FACTS
_Earlier and Continental_
Buchanan was born early in February 1506, at Moss or Mid-Leowen, on the
Blane Water, about two miles south-east of Killearn in Stirlingshire,
of a ‘family ancient rather than opulent,’ as he tells us in his
_Autobiography_, so that he was delivered from the peasant or upstart
consciousness which, except in the priesthood, would, in those feudal
times, have handicapped him heavily in the race of life. His real
and Scoto-Irish clan name was Macauslan, but the Macauslan having
acquired the lands of Buchanan in the Lennox, took the name of his
property, and became Buchanan of that Ilk; and thus it came to pass
that our George ranked as a ‘cadet of Buchanan,’ as Hannay was proud
and particular to specify. Ancient lineage, however, is no insurance
against misfortune, and the Buchanans of Moss, never rich, sank into
deep poverty. The father died in George’s youth, and the grandfather
who survived him was a waster and became a bankrupt, and Agnes Heriot,
the mother, was left to struggle with the upbringing of five sons and
three daughters--a task however, which she successfully accomplished,
like the heroine she was, as her most distinguished son gratefully
commemorates. Having never known wealth or luxury, perhaps it was
easier for Buchanan to reconcile himself to their opposites in after
years. In the Lennox they talked Gaelic, and Buchanan picked up that
speech to begin with. He would also learn some Scotch or Northern
English from his mother, who came from Haddingtonshire, and in addition
she was careful to have him sent to the schools in the neighbourhood,
where he could learn the elements of Latin.
For the old Church had not entirely neglected popular education,
as has been shown, in a very interesting way, in Grant’s _Burgh
Schools of Scotland_, and as, indeed, appears on the face of the
Reformers’ _First Book of Discipline_ itself (1560). Most of the
burghs maintained schools, both secondary and elementary, so that
the barons and freeholders who were ordered by the celebrated Act of
James IV. (1494) to keep their heirs at school until they had learned
‘perfyt Latyn’--then the international language of the educated and
of diplomacy--had abundant opportunity of doing so had they chosen,
although unfortunately they too seldom chose; so that the burgh
schools were largely recruiting-grounds for the priesthood. There were
also elementary Church schools, in many cases taught by women, and
private adventure schools; and in these a considerable number of the
children of the poor were taught at least to read. Accordingly, when
it is said that Knox and the Reformers established the Scottish Parish
School system, a little discrimination must be exercised. They did not
invent popular education--they found it; but they did invent, on paper,
in the _First Book of Discipline_, the idea of bringing education to
the people’s doors, by securing that there should be a school wherever
there was a ‘kirk’--that is, practically in every parish; so that ‘the
youth-head and tender children shall be nourished and brought up in
vertue, _in presence of their friends_, by whose good attendance many
inconveniences may be avoyded in which the youth commonly fall, either
by over much libertie which they have in strange and unknowne places,
while they cannot rule themselves; or else for lack of good attendance,
and of such necessaries as their tender age requires.’
So far the _Book of Discipline_, at once recognising an existing
educational system, and suggesting, for reason given, the vital
improvement of its national application! The whole scheme, indeed,
is admirable, including as it does compulsion, the picking out
and, in the case of the poor, supporting the class of youth suited
for the higher kinds of service to society, while the others not so
gifted ‘must be set to some handie craft, or to some other profitable
exercise’--that is, technical education, or some other form of
practical training. I have said ‘on paper,’ but not by way of sneer,
and ought to add in passing, that it was not the fault of Knox and
his associates that it remained to a great extent merely ‘on paper,’
instead of being immediately and effectually established. It was the
fault and the disgrace of a different type of men. Knox, as I have
already said, was a politician, and made dexterous use of the ‘Lords
of the Congregation’ to secure the triumph of Protestantism. But
these ‘Lords of the Congregation’ were politicians also, and made an
equally dexterous use of Knox to fill their own pockets with Church
spoil--I except a few, who were really noble men. They gave little for
parish churches, and nothing that I ever heard of for parish schools.
The whole thing broke poor Knox’s heart. It did not ruffle Buchanan,
although he was probably the greatest educational enthusiast in Europe
at the moment. But he was really a greater intelligence and a calmer
master of himself than Knox, and probably knew that any one who expects
to find more than twenty-five per cent.--if so much--of the race as
existing at any given moment worthy of intellectual or moral respect,
must either have had little experience of life, or possess a very low
standard of human excellence.
Not till 1696 was the plan of the _Book of Discipline_ adumbrated in
legislation, and the successors of the ‘Lords of the Congregation’
bound by law to provide a school-house and a salaried teacher in every
parish. But during the whole of the intervening century and a third,
the Presbyterian clergy never ceased in their efforts, and often their
sacrifices, for popular education, while at the same time fighting
a steady battle for liberty against as mean and cruel a crusade of
Absolutist Monarchy and Ecclesiastical Tyranny as ever was preached
by a ridiculous and pedant Peter against a self-respecting people.
For myself, I fail to find much of the theology of the Covenanters
credible--although I must say I should like if we could hear Knox
and Melville, or even Cameron and Cargill, on the existing state of
things. I think we should get some different guidance from what we
are receiving from those blind leaders of the blind who shiveringly
and stammeringly attempt to fill their places. For it is almost
impossible to appraise too highly the service done by the Covenanters
for the cause of liberty and popular education; and although they had
their very obvious faults, one is always sorry to think that the
aristocratic and Episcopalian prejudices of Scott should have led him
to hold them up to ridicule, while glad that a higher and juster view
was taken by a greater Scotsman even than Scott, when, in answer to a
contemptuous critic of the men of the Covenant, Burns turned on him
with the withering _impromptu_:--
‘The Solemn League and Covenant
Cost Scotland blood--cost Scotland tears--
But it sealed Freedom’s sacred cause--
If thou’rt a slave, indulge thy sneers.’[5]
We go back to young George Buchanan (1517-19) at the Catholic local
grammar-school of Killearn or Dumbarton, or wherever else in the
neighbourhood secondary education was to be had. The boy had shown
such aptitude that his uncle, James Heriot, who is said to have been
Justiciar of Lothian, sent him to the University of Paris, then, though
not quite so much as at an earlier date, enjoying the reputation of
the most notable of any seat of learning in existence. Instead of
being required to pass through the preparatory school, he at once began
his studies in the Arts faculty (1520, age fourteen), his Scottish
acquirements having apparently been sufficient to pass him through
whatever entrance examination was imperative. Here he spent about two
years, working mainly at Latin versification, which, as his reputation
for Latin poetry was to be the making of him in after years, was
perhaps the best thing he could do, especially as he liked it. At this
point, as evil fate would have it, his uncle died, and he himself fell
ill. But as he was penniless, he had to struggle home, illness and all,
as best he could, and was not able to move about again for a year or
thereabouts (1523). And then it turned out that a very singular purpose
had entered the mind of the ill or convalescent student of seventeen.
[_Here ends Dr. Wallace’s MS._]
That purpose was to enlist as a volunteer in an army for the invasion
of England, to be led by the Regent Albany, who had supposed wrongs of
his own as well as of the borders to avenge against that old neighbour
and untiring enemy. That army, consisting of French auxiliaries and
Scottish recruits, marched to Melrose and then partly crossed the
Tweed by a wooden bridge, then, holding Flodden in memory, intimated
a mutinous resolution not to cross the border, then marched down the
left bank of the river, and for three days besieged Wark Castle to
little effect, then made a sudden night-march to Lauder in a snowstorm,
‘which told heavily on man and beast,’ and reduced Buchanan to very
bad health for the rest of the winter. Buchanan, when he came to write
his own life in his old age, had come to believe that he joined this
abortive expedition to learn the art of war, which, without intentions
more far-seeing than those of a lad of eighteen, he certainly did, just
as Gibbon was educated to understand the evolution of the phalanx and
the legions, by what he saw, in his two and a half years’ captaincy
of the Hampshire Militia, of the evolutions of a modern battalion.
In the spring of 1525 Buchanan appeared as a ‘pauper student’ at the
University of St. Andrews, doubtless specially well qualified both as
a student and as a ‘pauper’--which epithet ‘pauper,’ however, meant
probably nothing more opprobrious than a youth who required board
and education free, like many a score of St. Andrews students, from
poet Buchanan to poet Fergusson, who about two and a half centuries
later sat at the bursar’s free table and said grace over the too
plentiful college rabbits that were last century procured from the
links that now swarm only with golfers. He was sent there, he tells
in his _Autobiography_, to ‘sit at the feet of John Major,’ the
celebrated logician of that age; but he did not long sit at his feet
as pupil before he felt in a position to criticise his master as a
teacher of sophistry rather than logic. Next summer, having taken
the St. Andrews B.A. degree, he followed or accompanied Major to
Paris, and there passed through two years’ adversity under pressure
of poverty and the suspicion of not being an orthodox Papist. Fortune
relaxed her frown, and he was admitted to the College of Ste. Barbe,
in which he was Professor of Grammar for three years. Meanwhile
Gilbert Kennedy, the young Earl of Cassilis, one of the earliest of
Scottish hero-worshippers, had the insight to appreciate his learning
and genius, and the devotion to adhere to him as friend, pupil, and
protector for five years. In 1533, the tutor dedicated to the pupil his
translation of Linacre’s Grammar, one of the items of work done by him
during his professorship in the College of Ste. Barbe; and in 1558,
after this pupil, who had held a prominent position among Scottish
nobles, died, probably from poison, at Dieppe, on his way home from
the marriage of Mary Stuart to the Dauphin, along with the other three
Scottish commissioners who had attended it, Buchanan celebrated him in
emphatic Latin verse that is now better known than most contemporary
epitaphs. Let it be told, however, to illustrate the cross-threads
that run through the web of life, that Queen Mary, on 9th October
1564, granted to Buchanan, who had been her tutor also, and probably
the most learned and intellectual of all her friends, a pension of
£500 Scots, or £25 sterling a year, from the Abbey of Crossraguel;
that the then Earl of Cassilis, son of Buchanan’s old pupil, claimed
the temporalities of that abbey as his own, and sometimes stopped
temporarily, and often permanently diminished, the pension which
had been granted by the Queen out of the spoils of the Reformation,
tarnishing by pious Protestant greed the brightest page in the history
of the earldom of Cassilis.
After Buchanan’s tutorship of the father of this grasping Protestant
was ended, and Buchanan was proposing to return to his old scholar’s
life in Paris, James V. detained him to act as tutor to one of his
natural sons--not the one known afterwards as the Good Regent, but
James Stewart, Prior of Coldingham. This king, who entertained the
idea that the clergy ought not to disregard the moral law as if
they were royal personages like himself, set Buchanan to the not
uncongenial task, upon which Dunbar and Sir David Lindsay of the Mount
had previously been engaged, of ‘lashing the vices’ of the clergy,
and especially of the monks. In the form of a dream, _Somnium_, he
represented to St. Francis the reasons of a decent man for refusing to
enter this order of sainthood--reasons which, because of their truth,
might satisfy a saint, but which also, because of their truth, would
likely be disagreeable to sanctified hypocrites and scoundrels. Two
palinodes, wearing the aspect of apologies, were seen by those who
understood irony to be rather stinging aggravations of the original
satire. After some months of a mixed tumult of priestly rage and
secular laughter, the royal love of fun and of virtue again prompted
Buchanan to renew the attack, which he did by beginning _Franciscanus_,
not published till 1560, and then dedicated to the Regent Moray and
gradually extended to a thousand Latin lines, which contain the most
polished, skilfully contemptuous exposure of the arts, ignorance, and
vices of the later generations of the Romish clergy in Scotland. It is
still worth reading by all who enjoy rough, boisterous, coarse humour,
as also by all anti-Papist fanatics, even if they should renew their
Latin studies for nine months to enable them to understand and utilise
it. These men, drenched with satire, published and unpublished, whose
craft of various hues was endangered by it, of course thought that it
would be judicious if not just to burn its author. Cardinal Beaton had
him on his list of heretics,--for what heresy could be so dangerous as
disbelief in the solid, well-fed, red-faced exponents of infallible
truth? In 1539 he escaped from prison in Edinburgh[6] when his guards
were asleep. But being warned after the King had received the MS. of
_The Franciscan_ that Beaton had offered this fickle monarch a price
for his head, he felt constrained to bid farewell once more to his
native country. He fled to England, but, as Henry VIII. was then busy
burning all shades of believers that did not suit his personal fancy,
Buchanan thought it prudent to trust his safety and his fortunes once
more to Paris. On arriving there, however, he found that Cardinal
Beaton was there before him as ambassador, so on the invitation of
Andrew Gouvéa he withdrew to Bordeaux. There he taught three years
at least in the public schools, and wrote four tragedies for the
annual exhibitions of these schools, to wit _The Baptist_, _Medea_,
_Jepthes_, and _Alcestis_. In the College of Guyenne he had Gouvéa as
a principal, and as a pupil Montaigne, the celebrated sceptic, who is
dogmatic enough to state in one of his essays that Gouvéa was ‘without
comparison the chiefest rector in France,’ and that he himself had, as
a principal actor, ‘undergone and represented the chiefest parts in the
Latin Tragedies of Buchanan.’ When here, Beaton and the Franciscans
harassed him until that fear was dispelled by the plague raging over
Aquitaine and the death of his fickle patron, the King of Scots.
Next, about 1547, in the wake or under the convoy of Gouvéa, he
migrated to Portugal in response to the invitation of the King to teach
in a resuscitation of the University of Coimbra that was being then
worked out at great expense for education in the liberal arts and the
philosophy of Aristotle. Many of his friends, eminent for learning,
were there before him, and he expected to find peace in that out of
the way corner of the world. But Gouvéa died suddenly, and then all
his enemies ran at him with open mouth. He was thrown into prison,
charged with writing against the Franciscans and eating flesh in Lent.
The Inquisitors tormented themselves and him for six months without
stateable result; and then, thinking it prudent, and perhaps honest,
to conceal that their toil had been in vain, they shut him up in a
monastery to be converted to the true faith or to be prepared for the
fagots. To the great scholar, however, the monks, though ignorant,
behaved not unkindly. They allowed him the truest literary leisure
and quiet he ever had except perhaps in St. Andrews; and he devoted
it to the so-called translation of David’s Psalms into Latin verse,
which are in truth artistic evolutionary expositions from Hebrew
hints, or splendid blossoms of sacred poetry grown from the seed given
by the poet-king of Israel to the winds of heaven, in the moments of
inspiration occurring in a life of suffering, of passion, and of hope.
Never elsewhere did the iron fetters of Buchanan’s own environment
permit him to soar so close to the firmament.
When set at liberty, though the King of Portugal offered him the means
of subsistence, he returned to England. But as affairs were then in
disorder under a young king, he in a short time returned to France
and celebrated the siege of Metz in a Latin poem, not without the
approbation which rewarded all his efforts in that line of composition.
Thereafter the Marshal de Brissac called him to Italy, and he lived
with him and his son in Italy and France for four years till 1560,
spending much time in writing his poem _De Sphæra_, and in study of the
religious controversies then seething through civilised Europe, and
carrying it into a scientific region that rendered a poetic exposition
of the Ptolemaic system a work of futility and utterly misspent power.
In 1561 he returned to his native country, and there indicated his
Rationalistic leanings to the side of Protestantism. Nevertheless,
the non-Protestant Mary Stuart, of ever-living memory in the realm of
history and romance, pursued her studies in Livy and other classics
with his help. As formerly mentioned, she endowed him with a pension
of £500 a year. But in after years Mary’s faults or her misfortunes
threw them into the hostile camps that tore Scotland into confusion
and deadly discord. In regard to the murder of Darnley, he came to the
conclusion, on the evidence of open foes and of professed friends,
that she was guilty. He preferred truth to the beautiful queen, and
it is difficult to comprehend how any man capable of weighing and
scrutinising such evidence as was accessible to him can blame him.[7]
Buchanan has been accused of ingratitude to Mary, his friend as well
as his mistress, divinely gifted and divinely appointed. He may have
been compelled to seem ungrateful through the lying of ill-informed
Reformers and rogues; but sure am I that his Latin and other Humanist
studies with that most fascinating and accomplished of women, or
at least of queens, gave him the opportunity of forming an idea of
her intellectual powers and unsurpassed personal charms that no
other contemporary in Scotland was mentally and morally capable of
forming, and I don’t doubt that this idea finds sincere expression
in his dedication to her of his version or paraphrase of the Psalms
of the Hebrew poet-king, without any hint whatever of kindred royal
frailties, or of tendencies thereto. What Buchanan must have seen in
her when he had the best opportunity of sight and knowledge stands
recorded unalterably in his noble verse that rolls down the centuries,
bearing an impress of insight and sincerity unequalled in the poetical
portraiture of queens till Tennyson laid his dedication at the feet of
the most illustrious and fortunate of all her countless descendants.
A true poet I believe to be a true seer, and incapable of falsehood
to the extent that he has had the chance to see. But a true poet may
be deceived. Spenser and Shakespeare were deceived into uttering
gross flatteries about Queen Elizabeth; but they were deceived by the
dense atmosphere of lying by which one of the cleverest, falsest,
most hateful of women of all history encompassed herself. That Queen
Mary should have been no worse than she was in a world with her royal
cousin and rival flaunting her fictitious moral and physical beauties
at the head of it, and getting prematurely canonised as the Good Queen
Bess, ought certainly to qualify or blot out for ever all that can
be stated truly and justly in condemnation or even grave censure of
Queen Mary. Therefore let the modest and honest muse of History cease
howling and canting about her crimes, and try to refrain from lavishing
eulogy upon her kindred in position and in blood--Henry VIII., the
Royal Bluebeard, and his inconstant, cruel, deceitful daughter--a pair
of monarchs whose fickle affections led so many adventurous wives
and ambitious wooers to the scaffold, by processes that involved the
partial but temporary corruption of their country’s conscience.
The wants and troubles of his country beset Buchanan with many a
call of duty, and cast upon him loads of multifarious work, such as
perhaps never in the history of human-kind before were thrown upon the
most accomplished and studious of living men. The tasks assigned to
Buchanan, and the duties imposed upon him, reflect no inconsiderable
honour and credit upon his lawless, homicidal, half-civilised
countrymen. While still friendly with Queen Mary, he gave effect
to his Reformation convictions, by sitting and working for years,
from 1563 onwards, as a member of the new-born democratic General
Assembly, knowing well enough that it was an institution that the
Queen would have been happy to see strangled, even before it began
to discuss the scandals of Rizzio and Darnley with the plain-spoken
impudence of a rustic kirk-session and the arrogance of an infallible
tribunal. Buchanan was one of the Commissioners that revised the _Book
of Discipline_, and, along with Knox and others, was a member of a
committee appointed to confer regarding the causes that fell, or that
ought to fall, within the jurisdiction of the Kirk. In 1567, a few
days after the beginning of Mary’s imprisonment in Lochleven, Buchanan
filled the chair of the Moderator of the General Assembly, a position
that for generations has not called for the worldly wisdom and terse,
impatient talk of a layman, and seldom, if ever, so much required to be
reminded of the limits of its power and jurisdiction as when Buchanan
sat as its Moderator, and the head of the State was a captive.
In the previous year, Queen Mary’s half-brother, the Earl of Moray,
commendator of the Priory of St. Andrews, and as such patron of the
Principalship of St. Leonard’s College there, appointed Buchanan to
that office, which he held for four years. During these years St.
Leonard’s, which in the first year was studentless, became the best
attended of the three St. Andrews colleges. But the fame of the
‘greatest poet of the age’ could not permanently revive the fortunes of
St. Leonard’s, nor did the efforts of the Parliamentary Commission of
1579, of which Andrew Melville as well as Buchanan were members. By the
time Dr. Johnson was on his way to the Hebrides, the College buildings
were ruinous and forsaken, including St. Leonard’s Church, of which the
Doctor could not see the inside, because of decent excuses exciting in
his mind the hope that ‘Where there is still shame there may yet be
virtue.’[8]
The Regent Moray, Buchanan’s patron and friend, to whom the
_Franciscanus_ was dedicated, was a recognised mainstay of
Protestantism, heartily hated by the allies of the Queen and of the
Pope. He was assassinated in Linlithgow on 20th January 1570, partly
to further their interests and partly to gratify private revenge.
Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh was waiting for him in the house of his
uncle, Archbishop Hamilton, with small-bore matchlock and lighted
match, and the accident of a crowded street gave him the opportunity
of a deliberate aim. His death was laid at the door of the Hamiltons,
and it stirred the patriotism of Buchanan to write a political
pamphlet, called an _Admonition to the Trew Lordes_, in the vernacular
of Scotland, directed against the Hamiltons and their friends--a
publication full of practical insight, good sense, and cogent argument,
the work of a wise, earnest, sagacious man, who in the zeal for the
good of his country forgot that he had the gift of poetic inspiration,
in that respect very unlike his great successor Milton when he too
became a political pamphleteer, more rhapsodical than relevant. He
suspected the Hamiltons of a desire to secure the crown, and Buchanan
very much preferred to them Queen Mary and her son, whose birth he
had welcomed as a star of hope for his country. His birthday ode
of welcome, ostensibly intended for the boy when he grew up, but
positively in the meantime for the guidance and the warning of his
mother, is in substance a serious homily on the duty of kings to God
and the people, from whom their power came, and whose will and welfare
alone justified its exercise. The essence of the _De Jure Regni_
underlies it, an essence never practically intelligible to the fated
House of Stuart. Neither the beautiful, brilliant Mary nor her erratic
but not stupid race could understand the teaching of Buchanan as an
exposition of the law of the King of kings. The fate of that race, from
her flight to England to the flight from Culloden, has helped the world
to understand it. They were doomed to be born in and live through ages
of ignorance, superstition, and falsehood, in which few men arose who
could discover and recognise truth and publish it at their risk for the
dark here and the darker hereafter, as was done by Buchanan. He may
not have been infallible, but he had insight, veracity, and courage,
the like of which will never be exhibited by his traducers to the end
of time. Those who can believe him guilty of base ingratitude and
malicious falsehood are incapable of discriminating the best from the
worst in human nature and in human history.
Buchanan’s truthfulness and resolute desire to be impartial can be
best inferred in our time from his _History of Scotland_, at which he
had written for years, and for which he had collected materials from
his boyhood. The style of it appears to be an eclectic adaptation of
available and appropriate elements from the styles of Livy, Sallust,
and Tacitus. It wants the special charm of ‘Livy’s pictured page,’
for Scottish places, deeds, heroes, and tastes did not for Buchanan’s
earnest, realistic, dialectical, judicial mind present inducements
to poetic word-painting--indeed, it was after his day, before the
fascinations of the picturesque dawned upon the mind of Scotland,
unless it may have been to some semi-mythical, mist-inspired member
of the tribe of Ossian. The speeches of his _History_ are the most
tersely expressed, forcibly reasoned specimens of ancient Scottish
oratory, assuming, of course, that they ought to have been delivered,
but that they never were. They want the terse, pregnant suggestiveness
of the orations of Tacitus; but they may probably appear to be not
less skilfully adapted for the dramatic surroundings in which they are
supposed to have been delivered. Young students of Latin, especially
in the Aberdeen region, have found it to be for their interest to
read and re-read Buchanan’s _History_, and it is in the original that
the literary art and linguistic skill of its author can be best seen.
But it is still worth reading, and is often read in Dr. Watkins’
translation, which as a translation reflects a good deal more credit
upon its author than his old-womanly, newspapery but not dishonest
attempt at original historical composition shown in his bringing
down of Buchanan’s masterly story to the culmination or extinction
of Scottish history in the visit of George IV. to Edinburgh. The
babes and sucklings of the school of Dry-as-dust assert that Buchanan
is superseded as an historian; but a man of Buchanan’s powers and
opportunities can never be superseded as a narrator of the history of
his own time.
Buchanan died on the 28th September 1582, a few days or weeks after his
_History_ had been published. He had striven, in spite of old age,
ill-health, and poverty, to accomplish this long-meditated patriotic
task; and when he had corrected the proofs and given it to the world,
he felt that his last slender tie to life was broken, and his long,
chequered, poorly-paid day’s work was done.
His death took place in Kennedy’s Close, the second close off the High
Street of Edinburgh above the Tron Church, as recorded by ‘George
Paton, Antiquary,’ upon the rather reliable authority of an ancient
Lord Advocate, Sir James Stewart of Goodtrees.
His last lodging was in ‘the first house in the turnpike above the
tavern,’ and occupied some few cubic feet of space, probably about
twelve feet above the existing causeway blocks of Hunter Square, an
entirely vanished pile of tall, substantial, over-populated masonry,
part of the crest of the High Street once, standing within a quarter
of a mile of the vanished garden in which Darnley was found dead in
his shirt without mark of violence, still nearer to the site of the
vanished house in which Walter Scott was born, and to the vacant
air-space once filled by Johnny Dowie’s vanished tavern, in which
during his Edinburgh sojourn Robert Burns was wont to make merry with
select friends.
The records of the Commissary Court show that Buchanan left no property
except £100 of his Crossraguel pension (gifted by Queen Mary, and
withheld as often and as long as he could by the Earl of Cassilis),
which had been in arrear from the previous Whitsunday. His ‘Inventar’
exhibits him in his true character of an ancient philosopher, whether
Stoic or not. The civic authorities of Edinburgh, who from time
immemorial have been ready and willing to bury scholars, buried his
body the day after his death at the public expense. The ground of
Greyfriars, one of the spoils of the Reformation, was then being turned
into a burying-ground, and Buchanan was the ‘first person of celebrity’
buried in it. The exact spot of his sepulture is, however, in doubt,
though a small tablet was put up by a humble blacksmith to mark where
it is believed to be--a tribute of hero-worship like to that in
Parliament Square which is supposed to mark the burial-place of Knox.
It is not likely that Buchanan ever asked the Town Council of Edinburgh
for bread, but it is believed that they gave him a stone--without any
inscription, however, to show for whom it was intended, so that by 1701
it was lost or stolen. His skull also is believed to be one of the
lawful and sacred possessions of the Edinburgh University. If genuine,
it may be a phrenological curiosity. Sir W. Hamilton once used it at
a lecture which was listened to and approved of by Thomas Carlyle. Sir
William demonstrated to Carlyle’s satisfaction that the said skull,
supposed to be Buchanan’s, was according to phrenological dogmas
far inferior to that of some ‘Malay cut-throat’ or other unredeemed
ruffian. Assuming this to be the fact--and my authority for believing
it is a letter of Carlyle published in Veitch’s _Life_ of Sir W.
Hamilton--I am surprised that Mr. Hosack and Sir John Skelton were not
converted to phrenology. But for my part, believing in the universal
but mostly untranslatable symbolism of Nature, from the ‘flower in the
crannied wall’ to the human face and form divine, and believing only to
a limited extent in phrenology as the dark side of physiognomy that is
open to touch rather than to sight, I should hold that the skull which
was inferior to a Malay’s in any respect except thickness could never
be the skull of Buchanan; and it would not alter my conviction to feel
sure that George Combe was present at Sir William Hamilton’s lecture,
and for the first and only time in their career of phrenological
disputation expressly agreed with him. Whatever Buchanan’s head and
face may have been like--and his portraits impute to him either sleepy,
benevolent dulness, or ferrety, peevish conceit--it is not believable
that his head or face could have ever resembled that of a Malay or any
other kind of savage. So acute a logician as Sir W. Hamilton ought to
have doubted one of his premises at least, and been able to conceive it
possible that the resetters of dead men’s skulls may be sometimes the
victims of outside, as well as inside, deception.
EPILOGISTIC
The sudden and untimely death of Dr. Wallace has left this volume
incomplete, and incapable of being completed as he would have done it.
Detailed facts are in part awanting, but they are awanting in every
biography and autobiography, and after the oblivion of centuries has
passed over them, they tend to be unintelligible and uninteresting as
lying remote from everyday experience. These, however, the inquiring
reader, to his reasonable satisfaction, can find elsewhere; what he
will never find elsewhere are Dr. Wallace’s ultimate, deliberate,
critical estimates of the life and work of Buchanan. His book, as it
grew under his nimble pen, grew, probably unconsciously, to be not so
much an articulation of the bare bones of fact as a narrative of the
genesis, evolution, growth, and vitality of Buchanan’s ideas, more
especially his ideas affecting social democratic development, and in
particular his capital heresy, dangerous for himself, but vital for the
race, touching the ‘rights of man.’
Few men of any country have had such versatility of talent, and have in
life found tasks so varied as George Buchanan and Robert Wallace. No
other Scotsman known to me, through credible report or in the flesh,
has had the personal experience that would enable him so well to
understand and interpret the personal experience of George Buchanan.
Both were pre-eminent in the university learning of their respective
eras, which had little in common except Latin; scholastic logic and
metaphysic being the dominating study of Buchanan’s days, as inductive
positive science is of ours. Both were wandering scholars seeking for
fortune, or at least for bread; each acting as tutor, schoolmaster,
university professor, man of letters, theologian, politician, and
teacher of public men who were too ignorant or too neglectful of
honest rational principle to be fit to rule in mercy and in justice;
both were doomed by circumstances or by conscience to poverty and the
discrediting influences of poverty, though fit to furnish invaluable
light and guidance to their fellow-men. Methinks the pre-Reformation
church was a kinder, less harsh nursing-mother to the inquiring,
doubting, hesitating, satirical Protestant, than the dry-as-dust nurses
of ultra-Protestantism, agnosticism, atheism, and sincere worship of
nothing except Mammon’s golden calf were to the learned literary
man of our day who, afflicted with distracting doubts himself, and
many sorrows, could still give reasons for his faith in a supreme
Creator and an administrator of the universe according to fixed law
and unswerving right, and could help to lift the mind of his age out
of a darkness deeper than Popery--the blackness of atheistic despair.
Both knew about politics as revealed in the wrangling of churches or
religious sects, and the strife of factions intriguing and fighting
for power to govern or to misgovern. The politics familiar to Buchanan
included the ethics that prompted and the arts that effected the
murders of Cardinal Beaton, Rizzio, Darnley, Regent Moray, and Queen
Mary, and that often imperilled his own life. Nevertheless, worn out by
his years and assiduous labours, he died in his bed when his work was
done, a fortnight after his _History_ of his country was published, and
before his old pupil the Scottish Solomon had time to discover all the
treason it contained; ordered his servant to give his few last coins to
a beggar, and left the care of his funeral to all whom it might concern
on Christian, natural, civic, and sanitary grounds, ending his long,
busy, chequered tenure of time with that courage and hope which gilds
the last sunset of those who have striven to do right and never doubted
that God is just.
There was no man in Scotland or in Europe that could have been of so
much service to Scotland in guiding it through the troubles and storms,
political, moral, and religious, of the Reformation as Buchanan, if
the people of Scotland, more especially the feudal lords of Scotland,
had been fit to follow the dictates of the broadest, most complete
worldly wisdom, and of the clear conscience of one who had spent his
years in study and in poverty, who had lived the life of a stranger
to the entanglements of foolish pleasure and the illusions of earthly
hope, who had the most of his possible life behind him and eternity
in no distant prospect, and who had no conceivable motive to applaud
murder or to tell lies. Sceptical by innate constitution, and educated
to doubt in the schools of adversity and experience, personal and
historical, he was not the man to commit himself hastily to faith in
dark dogmas and half-explored truths; he was the man to be a cautious,
judicious reformer, not the man to be an impetuous, frantic destroyer,
too rash and unrestrained to discriminate between the entirely and
partially unsound, too just to plunder churchmen, some of them
profligate, in order to enrich feudal lords skilled in few arts except
the arts of war and theft. Like Erasmus and Beza, he saw that the old
order of society was dissolving; but, like all wise men, he preferred
slow and gradual to revolutionary change.
John Knox, in point of culture and of pure intellect and reason, was
a small man--a rash, daring, half-educated schoolboy, compared with
Buchanan. Knowledge and reason are conservative forces, and Knox could
not have been great had he not been a destroyer. His most indelible
historical records are the ruins of cathedrals and other religious
houses, ‘rooks’ nests’ requiring to be pulled down only in the judgment
of blind superstition and rabid fanaticism. For the ignorance and
savagery of the people of Scotland the Church of Rome was primarily
to blame. That Church required reformation, moral and intellectual;
but no spiritual entity, however corrupt, can be miraculously reformed
by the destruction of Gothic or any other architecture which took its
form under the sincere art and piety of buried generations. Cardinal
Beaton’s mode of burning good true men to support and preserve the
divine truth that had vitalised his Church for centuries was irrational
and infernal; but it was not very much worse than the mad, destructive
fury inspired by John Knox’s ‘excellent’ sermons, which, whatever their
merits, can scarcely have emanated from a mind that had any clear
comprehension of the processes by which spiritual truth makes its way
and holds its power effectively among mankind. Beaton and Knox were
both powerful in their age and characteristic of it, but they would
have found no conspicuous function in an age that was not in the
course of emerging from the mire of savagery, with all its tendencies
to violence and to vice. Both alike were uncompromising enemies of
individual freedom, and equally bent upon the suppression of all
conscientious opinions that did not concur with their own. Both were
patriots, and of signal service to Scotland; but the evil they did so
nearly counterbalances all the good they did (which might, and would,
in time have been done by less unscrupulous, ungentle instruments),
that it might have been well had Scotland been liberated by Providence
from the piebald burden of both of them.[9]
Buchanan as a scholar was a very large inheritor of the wisdom of
many ages, the largest inheritor of that rare kind of wealth of all
the Scotsmen of his day. He was by nature somewhat of a sceptic, the
teacher in Latin--and who can tell what beside?--of Montaigne--most
candid and sincere of sceptics--by necessity a doubter, as true seekers
of truth, especially in dark, troubled, fermenting ages, cannot help
being. He was a philosopher--a Stoic probably, as most impecunious
philosophers are compelled to be more or less, capable of bearing the
inevitable with patience, and of waiting to solve difficulties by
skill and cautious experiment rather than by violence or deceit! What
his worldly wisdom and great intellectual power might have done for
the good of his country opens up a wide field of conjecture touching
the solution of most of the big problems of his age. Why should the
clever, beautiful Queen Mary not have trusted him as an adviser rather
than Scotch rakes and traitors and Italian fiddlers? Why should her
race, more gifted than most royal races, have hugged a delusion about
the Divine right of kings along the precipices overhanging death and
ruin? Why should the Reformers, who had the means of ascertaining
that among them he was a veritable Saul among the prophets, and
neither a fanatic nor a hypocrite, not have utilised his wisdom and
his inspiration of the beautiful and the true to direct the course and
shape the limits of the Reformation, without proclaiming a barbarian,
everlasting divorce between the power of truth and the beauty of
holiness? Why should the spiritual force and illumination of every
great man who did not wear fine raiment and fare sumptuously every
day, of the prophets of Judæa and the sages of Greece and Rome, have
been lost upon their contemporaries and left to find its way and its
expanding efficacy in the slow course of centuries? Buchanan’s lot was
the common lot of unendowed, and therefore unappreciated, genius. The
greatest scholar and writer of his own country in his own time, one
of the most potent of the intellectual aristocracy of Europe for all
time, he was a rustic in dress, a plain, unpretentious, non-assertive
inhabitant of the European villages called cities, known to him as St.
Andrews and Edinburgh; a man pure of life in a vicious, half-decent
age; loyal to truth so far as it was possible for him to discover it
among contemporaries prone to falsehood and ready for the perpetration
of it by forgery or any other effective and not unpracticable mode,
he was esteemed a stranger in his native land, and not a Solon or a
seer except by the more cultured of his own unlettered generation;
to subsequent vulgar generations he was so unknown or so forgotten
as to fill, in their rude Temple of Fame, the niche of a mythical
court-jester and coarse wit or witling; nevertheless he holds a title
to lasting remembrance as sure as the story of the Reformation and
the era of the never-to-be-forgotten Mary Stuart can give; also the
unique distinction of being the greatest master of the Latin language
since it died as a vernacular, and became the immortal medium of
intercommunication for the wide, high, and cold republic of scholars
and thinkers, scattered through realms of ether and cloudland, and lit
by volcanic fire and spiritual aurora fitfully lifting the night from
peaks of rock and ice.
FOOTNOTES
[1] When I first heard from one of my early schoolmasters the mediæval
chestnut, _Quid distat inter sotum et Scotum?--Mensa tantum._ (‘What
divides a sot (fool) from a Scot?--Only the table’)--the reply was
credited to Buchanan.
[2] He was Buchanan’s assistant, and called the king’s ‘Pedagogue,’
Buchanan being called ‘Master.’
[3] Certain emoluments arising to the feudal superior (in this case the
king); which, as they depend on uncertain events, are termed casualties.
[4] This covers the meaning more accurately than ‘Physicians.’
[5] Burns appears to have afterwards written it down thus:--
‘The Solemn League and Covenant
Now brings a smile, now brings a tear;
But sacred Freedom, too, was theirs:
If thou’rt a slave, indulge thy sneer.’
The form may be improved, the sentiment could not be.
[6] My authority is Herkless’s _Cardinal Beaton_, p. 153.
[7] My non-forensic sympathy, but not my full conviction, goes with
Mr. Hosack and Sir John Skelton in their chivalrous but too unmeasured
defence of Mary. My verdict in regard to her being ‘art and part’ in
putting an end to that traitor in heart and deed, the good-for-nothing,
faithless fool Darnley, is a hesitant ‘Not Proven’; but if otherwise,
then a distinct non-hesitant ‘served him right.’ Skelton’s clever,
interesting book upon Maitland of Lethington, Mary’s most faithful and
capable minister, does not throw much, if any, light upon Buchanan.
In it he is treated as an opposition pleader, capable rather than
scrupulous, who did not know all the facts, and who was instructed
by men who had other purposes to serve than telling the whole truth,
and who probably did not know it themselves so well as Skelton had
opportunities to come to know it, _e.g._ in regard to the ‘Casket
Letters’--documents that could be satisfactory to no modern tribunal
except a Dreyfus court-martial. Buchanan’s attack, in a pamphlet
written in Scotch, upon Skelton’s hero Maitland, entitled _The
Chameleon_, Skelton sneers at as a ‘Dawb’--not entirely an inaccurate
criticism, for _The Chameleon_ is a caricature, and that, of course,
means an exaggeration of all faults, actual or presumable. But when
a ‘chameleon’ like Disraeli or Maitland, both of whom have found in
John Skelton an ingenious and eloquent hero-worshipper, is assailed
by satirists in _Punch_ or elsewhere, the only effective condemnatory
judgment worth stating is that the caricature is not recognisable by an
honest enemy or a free and easy friend. For my part, I believe that the
unvarnished truth, though perhaps not the whole of it, can be better
inferred from Buchanan than from Skelton.
[8] Sir David Brewster, when Principal of the United College of St.
Leonard and St. Salvador, had a residence close to St. Leonard’s
roofless church. In 1853, Sir David told to a breakfast-party of
students, which included Dr. Wallace and the writer, that his house
embraced all that existed of Buchanan’s old dwelling-house, and pointed
out one particular part of the ancient outer wall thick enough to
resist the artillery of Buchanan’s day. Dr. Johnson’s general contempt
for Scotland, which did not keep silence in St. Andrews, could not
resist the inspiration of the _genius loci_ of St. Leonard’s so far as
to prevent his generously recognising Buchanan’s claim to immortality
as being as fair as modern Latinity can give, and ‘perhaps fairer than
the instability of vernacular languages admit.’
[9] Carlyle’s estimate of Knox I accept and credit as the estimate of
as penetrating an insight and as true a conscience as ever uttered
the verdicts of history; but it is the estimate of a mind that could
discover more to approve in the storm than in the sunshine, and who
too readily infers noble motives from splendid results. I believe
all the good he imputes to Knox and his life-battle for truth, and
I don’t believe sufficiently in the vileness of human nature to
believe in any of the charges of immorality which rival ecclesiastics
have persisted in relating against him. But for all that, I am not
blind to his human imperfections. I am far from thinking him to be a
perfect man, much less a perfect Christian. His wild joy and unbridled
merriment over the dying miseries of Cardinal Beaton and of Mary of
Guise would be scarcely in harmony with the budding benevolence of a
half-reformed cannibal. His virtues were genuine, and not hypocritical,
but they were essentially Pagan virtues--gifts of nature, tested and
strengthened, but not acquired, through his experiences as a notary and
an ecclesiastic.
INDEX
_Admonition to Trew Lords_, the, 130.
Æschylus, 15.
_Agamemnon_, 15.
Arius, 91.
Ascham, Roger, 81.
Atonement, the, 90.
Augustine, 99.
Aurelius, Marcus, 100.
_Baptistes_, the, 57, 58.
Beaton, Cardinal, 122, 139.
Begging letter-writer, 31.
Beza, 81.
Boëtius, 66, 100.
Bordeaux, 58.
Brahe, Tycho, 44, 81.
Brissac, Marshal of, 51.
Brewster, Sir D., 129.
Brown, P. Hume, 18.
BUCHANAN, GEORGE--
Writings burned by hangman, 9.
Milton and Buchanan’s _De Jure_, 10.
Effect of the _De Jure_, 11.
Relations to the Scaligers, 13.
Wordsworth on Buchanan, 14.
Porson and Buchanan, 15.
Milton’s opinion of him, 15.
Hallam’s estimate of him, 16.
Froude’s opinion of him, 16.
Buchanan’s scholarship, 17.
His _Detectio Mariæ Reginæ_, 18.
The Marians and Buchanan, 20.
The chapbook Buchanan, 21.
His humour, 22.
Interview with Melvilles, 23.
The Countess of Mar and, 25.
Division of his life into periods of preparation and
performance, 27.
Why he became a Protestant, 28.
Joseph Scaliger’s elegy on, 31.
Begging letter-writer, 31.
Letters to Mary, Queen of Scots, 32.
Letters to Earl of Moray, 32.
Comparison between Erasmus and, 35.
Hospitality of Roman Catholic days, 36.
His influence on cultured Europe, 38.
Parallel between his conduct and that of to-day, 39.
No loss of self-respect, 40.
No notoriety hunter, 41.
No money grabber, 43.
Did not seek power, 48.
Dates and aims of his works, 50.
Moderator of General Assembly, 51.
Various appointments held, 51.
Aids in drawing up _First Book of Discipline_, 51.
Appointed Principal of St. Leonard’s College, 51.
Secretary to the Scots Commission _re_ Mary, 51.
Opinion of Sir James Melville of, 52.
Not to be blamed for James VI.’s pedantry, 57.
Dedicates his three great works to the king--_Baptistes_, _De Jure_,
and the _History_, 57.
Examination of the Prefaces to these, 58-65.
Resembled a Scots Stoic philosopher, 66.
His courtly manners, 70.
Alleged vindictiveness towards Morton disproved, 72.
His policy regarding Scots affairs, 76.
Further disproof of Sir J. Melville’s remarks, 80.
His religious views, 83.
The Scots Reformation position, 83-88.
His relations to Calvinism, 89-96.
Not a zealot, 90.
His views of Evangelium, 90.
His pension, 92.
His dirge upon Calvin, 93.
His period of doubt, 98.
Why he never took orders, 101.
Is Conformity allowable? 104.
Renaissance morals, 106.
Buchanan’s amorist poetry, 107.
Biographical facts, 111.
The Roman Catholic Church and education, 112.
Lords of the Congregation and education, 114.
His early years of education, 116.
Enlists as a volunteer to invade England, 118.
Life at St. Andrews University, 119.
Proceeds to St. Barbe, 119.
Friendship with Earl of Cassilis, 119.
James V. invites him to write _Franciscanus_, 121.
Leaves him to the vengeance of Beaton, 122.
Escapes from prison to the Continent, 122.
Migrates to Portugal: seized by the Inquisition, 123.
Imprisoned in a monastery, where he translates the Psalms, 123.
Returns to Scotland and declares for Protestantism, 124.
Relations between Mary and Buchanan, 125.
Accused of ingratitude towards her, 126.
The multifariousness of his work, 128.
Writes _Admonition to the Trew Lords_, 130.
Characteristics of his _History of Scotland_, 132.
Buchanan’s last days, 133.
His burial-place and property, 135.
Legend of his skull, 135.
Characteristics, 136.
Final summing up, 137-145.
Parallel drawn between Dr. Wallace and Buchanan, 138.
Burns, 107, 116.
Calvin, J., 82, 89, 90, 92, 94, 100.
Cameron, 115.
Cargill, 115.
Carlyle, T., 34, 143.
Casaubon, 13.
Cassilis, Lord, 51, 119, 134.
Catullus, 66.
_Chameleon_, the, 50, 126.
Chapbooks on Buchanan, 21.
Charles II., 9.
Cicero, 67.
Coimbra, college of, 51, 98.
Collége de Guyenne, 58.
Congregation, Lords of, 114, 115.
Covenanters, 115.
Darnley, 128, 134, 139.
Dawes, Canon, 15.
_Detectio Mariæ Reginæ_, 18, 50.
Diogenes, 69.
Dionysius, Lambinus, 67.
_Dirge_, the, 92.
_Discipline, Book of_, 112.
Divine right, 9, 11, 50, 57.
Dryden, John, 10.
Dunbar, William, 121.
Education in Catholic days, 113.
Election, doctrine of, 90.
Elizabeth, Queen, 127.
England, invasion of, 118.
Erasmus, 13, 34, 96, 99, 100.
Eucharistic controversy, 99.
Evangelicals, the, 89.
France, 124.
_Franciscanus_, the, 50, 90, 98, 106, 121.
Gamaliel, 58.
General Assembly of Church of Scotland, 51.
_Genethliacon_, the, 56.
Gibbon, 67, 118.
Gouvéa, André de, 58, 122, 123.
Hackney, the, 75.
Hamilton, Sir W., 135.
Hebrew Psalms, 43, 123.
Henry VIII., 127.
Heriot, J., 116.
Herod, King, 58.
Herodias, 58.
_History of Scotland_, 50, 57, 63, 132.
Horace, 66.
Hosack, 20.
Humanists, 27, 28, 43, 58, 83, 84, 126.
Incarnation, the, 90.
Indulgences, 90.
Inquisition, the, 43, 98.
James IV., 112.
James V., 50, 120.
James VI., 46, 52, 56, 76.
Johnson, S., 15, 129.
Justification by Faith, 86, 90.
Killearn, 111.
Knox, J., 11, 37, 40, 75, 76, 81, 85, 92, 101, 102, 114, 115, 141.
Latin Style, 17, 27, 132.
‘Lena’ poetry, the, 106.
Lennox, Earl of, 33, 37.
Leo X., 84.
Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 9.
Livy, 31, 51, 132.
Luther, 84.
Lyndsay, Sir D., 50, 121.
Macauslan, 111.
Major, John, 65.
Mar, Countess of, 24, 81.
Mary, Queen of Scots, 19, 31, 37, 40, 51, 64, 75, 92, 120, 127,
128, 139.
Mary of Guise, 102.
Melville, Andrew and James, 23, 40, 81, 102, 115.
Melville, Sir James, 52, 80.
Milton, John, 9, 10.
Moderator of Assembly, 51, 128.
Montaigne, 119.
Moray, Earl of, 32, 33, 37, 51, 81, 92, 121, 129, 130, 139.
Morton, Earl of, 73, 74, 75, 79.
_Neæra_ pieces, 108.
Nicene Dogmas, 86.
Oxford University, 9.
Panætius, 67.
Paris, University of, 116.
Paten, Guy, 16.
Pension, 92.
Petrus, Victorinus, 67.
Porson, 15.
Portugal, 43, 51, 98, 123.
Predestinarianism, 86.
Principal of St. Leonard’s, 51.
Private judgment, 86.
Randolph, Sir T., 63, 71, 81.
Reformation, Scots, 11, 83, 85, 87, 120.
Renaissance, the, 83, 87, 96, 106.
Revolutions, English, American, and French, 11.
Rizzio, 128, 139.
Roman Catholic hospitality, 36.
---- ---- Church, 28, 97, 99, 101.
Russell, Lord William, 9.
St. Andrews, University of, 118, 129.
Sallust, 132.
Scaligers, the, 12, 13, 30, 48, 81.
Scott, Sir W., 116.
Seneca, 63, 67, 100.
Shairp, Principal, 107.
Shakespeare, 12, 15.
Skelton, Sir J., 20, 125.
Skull, Buchanan’s, 135.
Socrates, 69, 100.
Stephanus, 12.
Stevenson, R. L., 107.
Stoic philosopher, 53, 63, 66, 69, 73, 82, 100.
Tacitus, 132.
Tennyson, 12, 127.
Thackeray, 34, 81.
_Thyestes_, the, 63.
Transubstantiation, 90.
Wordsworth, W., 14.
Young, Peter, 53, 55, 57, 62.
OPINIONS OF THE PRESS ON THE ‘FAMOUS SCOTS’ SERIES.
Of THOMAS CARLYLE, by H. C. MACPHERSON,
The _British Weekly_ says:--
‘We congratulate the publishers on the in every way attractive
appearance of the first volume of their new series. The typography is
everything that could be wished, and the binding is most tasteful....
We heartily congratulate author and publishers on the happy
commencement of this admirable enterprise.’
The _Literary World_ says:--
‘One of the very best little books on Carlyle yet written, far
outweighing in value some more pretentious works with which we are
familiar.’
The _Scotsman_ says:--
‘As an estimate of the Carlylean philosophy, and of Carlyle’s place
in literature and his influence in the domains of morals, politics,
and social ethics, the volume reveals not only care and fairness, but
insight and a large capacity for original thought and judgment.’
The _Glasgow Daily Record_ says:--
‘Is distinctly creditable to the publishers, and worthy of a national
series such as they have projected.’
The _Educational News_ says:--
‘The book is written in an able, masterly, and painstaking manner.’
Of ALLAN RAMSAY, by OLIPHANT SMEATON,
The _Scotsman_ says:--
‘It is not a patchwork picture, but one in which the writer, taking
genuine interest in his subject, and bestowing conscientious pains on
his task, has his materials well in hand, and has used them to produce
a portrait that is both lifelike and well balanced.’
The _People’s Friend_ says:--
‘Presents a very interesting sketch of the life of the poet, as well
as a well-balanced estimate and review of his works.’
The _Edinburgh Dispatch_ says:--
‘The author has shown scholarship and much enthusiasm in his task.’
The _Daily Record_ says:--
‘The kindly, vain, and pompous little wig-maker lives for us in Mr.
Smeaton’s pages.’
The _Glasgow Herald_ says:--
‘A careful and intelligent study.’
Of HUGH MILLER, by W. KEITH LEASK,
The _Expository Times_ says:--
‘It is a right good book and a right true biography.... There is a
very fine sense of Hugh Miller’s greatness as a man and a Scotsman;
there is also a fine choice of language in making it ours.’
The _Bookseller_ says:--
‘Mr. Leask gives the reader a clear impression of the simplicity, and
yet the greatness, of his hero, and the broad result of his life’s
work is very plainly and carefully set forth. A short appreciation
of his scientific labours, from the competent pen of Sir Archibald
Geikie, and a useful bibliography of his works, complete a volume
which is well worth reading for its own sake, and which forms a worthy
instalment in an admirable series.’
The _Daily News_ says:--
‘Leaves on us a very vivid impression.’
Of JOHN KNOX, by A. TAYLOR INNES,
Mr. Hay Fleming, in The _Bookman_ says:--
‘A masterly delineation of those stirring times in Scotland, and of
that famous Scot who helped so much to shape them.’
The _Freeman_ says:--
‘It is a concise, well written, and admirable narrative of the great
Reformer’s life, and in its estimate of his character and work it is
calm, dispassionate, and well balanced.... It is a welcome addition to
our Knox literature.’
The _Speaker_ says:--
‘There is vision in this book, as well as knowledge.’
The _Sunday School Chronicle_ says:--
‘Everybody who is acquainted with Mr. Taylor Innes’s exquisite lecture
on Samuel Rutherford will feel instinctively that he is just the man
to do justice to the great Reformer, who is more to Scotland ‘than any
million of unblameable Scotsmen who need no forgiveness.’ His literary
skill, his thorough acquaintance with Scottish ecclesiastical life,
his religious insight, his chastened enthusiasm, have enabled the
author to produce an excellent piece of work.... It is a noble and
inspiring theme, and Mr. Taylor Innes has handled it to perfection.’
Of ROBERT BURNS, by GABRIEL SETOUN,
The _New Age_ says:--
‘It is the best thing on Burns we have yet had, almost as good as
Carlyle’s Essay and the pamphlet published by Dr. Nichol of Glasgow.’
The _Methodist Times_ says:--
‘We are inclined to regard it as the very best that has yet been
produced. There is a proper perspective, and Mr. Setoun does neither
praise nor blame too copiously.... A difficult bit of work has been
well done, and with fine literary and ethical discrimination.’
_Youth_ says:--
‘It is written with knowledge, judgment, and skill.... The
author’s estimate of the moral character of Burns is temperate and
discriminating; he sees and states his evil qualities, and beside
these he places his good ones in their fulness, depth, and splendour.
The exposition of the special features marking the genius of the poet
is able and penetrating.’
Of THE BALLADISTS, by JOHN GEDDIE,
The _Birmingham Daily Gazette_ says:--
‘As a popular sketch of an intensely popular theme, Mr. Geddie’s
contribution to the “Famous Scots Series” is most excellent.’
The _Publishers’ Circular_ says:--
‘It may be predicted that lovers of romantic literature will re-peruse
the old ballads with a quickened zest after reading Mr. Geddie’s book.
We have not had a more welcome little volume for many a day.’
The _New Age_ says:--
‘One of the most delightful and eloquent appreciations of the ballad
literature of Scotland that has ever seen the light.’
The _Spectator_ says:--
‘The author has certainly made a contribution of remarkable value to
the literary history of Scotland. We do not know of a book in which
the subject has been treated with deeper sympathy or out of a fuller
knowledge.’
Of RICHARD CAMERON, by Professor HERKLESS,
The _Freeman_ says:--
‘Professor Herkless has made us all his debtors by his thorough-going
and unwearied research, by his collecting materials from
out-of-the-way quarters, and making much that was previously vague and
shadowy clear and distinct.’
The _Christian News_ says:--
‘This volume is ably written, is full of interest and instruction, and
enables the reader to form a conception of the man who in his day and
generation gave his life for Christ’s cause and kingdom.’
The _Dundee Courier_ says:--
‘In selecting Professor Herkless to prepare this addition to the
“Famous Scots Series” of books, the publishers have made an excellent
choice. The vigorous, manly style adopted is exactly suited to the
subject, and Richard Cameron is presented to the reader in a manner
as interesting as it is impressive.... Professor Herkless has done
remarkably well, and the portrait he has so cleverly delineated of one
of Scotland’s most cherished heroes is one that will never fade.’
Of SIR JAMES YOUNG SIMPSON, by EVE BLANTYRE SIMPSON,
The _Speaker_ says:--
‘This little book is full of insight and knowledge, and by many
picturesque incidents and pithy sayings it helps us to understand in
a vivid and intimate sense the high qualities and golden deeds which
rendered Sir James Simpson’s strenuous life impressive and memorable.’
The _Daily Chronicle_ says:--
‘It is indeed long since we have read such a charmingly-written
biography as this little Life of the most typical and “Famous
Scot” that his countrymen have been proud of since the time of Sir
Walter.... There is not a dull, irrelevant, or superfluous page in all
Miss Simpson’s booklet, and she has performed the biographer’s chief
duty--that of selection--with consummate skill and judgment.’
The _Leeds Mercury_ says:--
‘The narrative throughout is well balanced, and the biographer has
been wisely advised in giving prominence to her father’s great
achievement--the introduction of chloroform--and what led to it.’
Of THOMAS CHALMERS, by W. GARDEN BLAIKIE,
The _Spectator_ says:--
‘The most notable feature of Professor Blaikie’s book--and none could
be more commendable--is its perfect balance and proportion. In other
words, justice is done equally to the private and to the public life
of Chalmers, if possible greater justice than has been done by Mrs.
Oliphant.’
The _Scottish Congregationalist_ says:--
‘No one can read the admirable and vivid sketch of his life which
Dr. Blaikie has written without feeling admiration for the man, and
gaining inspiration from his example.’
Of JAMES BOSWELL, by W. KEITH LEASK,
The _Spectator_ says:--
‘This is one of the best volumes of the excellent “Famous Scots
Series,” and one of the fairest and most discriminating biographies of
Boswell that have ever appeared.’
The _Dundee Advertiser_ says:--
‘It is the admirable manner in which the very complexity of the man is
indicated that makes W. Keith Leask’s biography of him one of peculiar
merit and interest.... It is not only a life of Boswell, but a picture
of his time--vivid, faithful, impressive.’
The _Morning Leader_ says:--
‘Mr. W. K. Leask has approached the biographer of Johnson in the
only possible way by which a really interesting book could have been
arrived at--by way of the open mind.... The defence of Boswell in the
concluding chapter of his delightful study is one of the finest and
most convincing passages that have recently appeared in the field of
British biography.’
Of TOBIAS SMOLLETT, by OLIPHANT SMEATON,
The _Dundee Courier_ says:--
‘It is impossible to read the pages of this little work without being
struck not only by its historical value, but by the fairness of its
criticism.’
The _Weekly Scotsman_ says:--
‘The book is written in a crisp and lively style.... The picture of
the great novelist is complete and lifelike. Not only does Mr. Smeaton
give a scholarly sketch and estimate of Smollett’s literary career, he
constantly keeps the reader in conscious touch and sympathy with his
personality, and produces a portrait of the man as a man which is not
likely to be readily forgotten.’
The _Newsagent and Booksellers’ Review_ says:--
‘Tobias Smollett was versatile enough to deserve a distinguished place
in any gallery of gifted Scots, such as the one to which Mr. Smeaton
has contributed this clever and lifelike portrait.’
Of FLETCHER OF SALTOUN, by W. G. T. OMOND,
The _Edinburgh Evening News_ says:--
‘The writer has given us in brief compass the pith of what is known
about an able and patriotic if somewhat dogmatic and impracticable
Scotsman who lived in stormy times.... Mr. Omond describes, in
a clear, terse, vigorous way, the constitution of the Old Scots
Parliament, and the part taken by Fletcher as a public man in the
stormy debates that took place prior to the union of the Parliaments
in 1707. This part of the book gives an admirable summary of the state
of Scottish politics and of the national feeling at an important
period.’
The _Leeds Mercury_ says:--
‘Unmistakably the most interesting and complete story of the life of
Fletcher of Saltoun that has yet appeared. Mr. Omond has had many
facilities placed at his disposal, and of these he has made excellent
use.’
The _Speaker_ says:--
‘Mr. Omond has told the story of Fletcher of Saltoun in this monograph
with ability and judgment.’
Of THE BLACKWOOD GROUP, by Sir GEORGE DOUGLAS,
The _Scotsman_ says:--
‘In brief compass, Sir George Douglas gives us skilfully blended
together much pleasantly written biography and just and judicious
criticism.’
The _Weekly Citizen_ says:--
‘It need not be said that to every one interested in the literature
of the first half of the century, and especially to every Scotsman so
interested, “The Blackwood Group” is a phrase abounding in promise.
And really Sir George Douglas fulfils the promise he tacitly makes in
his title. He is intimately acquainted not only with the books of the
different members of the “group,” but also with their environment,
social and otherwise. Besides, he writes with sympathy as well as
knowledge.’
Of NORMAN MACLEOD, by JOHN WELLWOOD,
The _Star_ says:--
‘A worthy addition to the “Famous Scots Series” is that of Norman
Macleod, the renowned minister of the Barony of Glasgow, and a man as
typical of everything generous and broadminded in the State Church in
Scotland as Thomas Guthrie was in the Free Churches. The biography
is the work of John Wellwood, who has approached it with proper
appreciation of the robustness of the subject.’
The _Scots Pictorial_ says:--
‘Its general picturesqueness is effective, while the criticism is
eminently liberal and sound.’
The _Daily Free Press_ says:--
‘It is one of the great merits of Mr. Wellwood’s book that it is
wholly free from dulness. His attention once secured, the reader is
carried irresistibly along till he has finished the whole of the
fascinating story.’
The _Daily Chronicle_ says:--
‘Mr. Wellwood is in thorough sympathy with his hero, and has given us
in this little volume a graphic and picturesque sketch of him.’
Of SIR WALTER SCOTT, by GEORGE SAINTSBURY,
The _Pall Mall Gazette_ says:--
‘Mr. Saintsbury’s miniature is a gem of its kind.... Mr. Saintsbury’s
critique of the Waverley Novels will, I venture to think, despite all
that has been written upon them, discover fresh beauties for their
admirers.’
The _Morning Leader_ says:--
‘A fresh and charming biography.’
The _St. James’s Gazette_ says:--
‘Apart from Lockhart, we do not know any one who has given a better
picture of Scott than Mr. Saintsbury, and there is no sounder and more
comprehensive estimate of his work.’
The _Scots Magazine_ says:--
‘The little volume is bright, informative reading, and is a worthy
addition to a capital and much-needed series.’
Of KIRKCALDY OF GRANGE, by LOUIS A. BARBÉ,
The _Scotsman_ says:--
‘Mr. Barbé’s sketch sticks close to the facts of his life, and these
are sought out from the best sources and are arranged with much
judgment, and on the whole with an impartial mind.’
The _Glasgow Herald_ says:--
‘A conscientious and thorough piece of work, showing wide and accurate
knowledge.’
The _Speaker_ says:--
‘This scholarly monograph seeks to unravel the seeming contradictions
of a great career, as well as to show that Kirkcaldy of Grange was a
sincere patriot.’
The _Bookseller_ says:--
‘Mr. Barbé has put together a very instructive and interesting account
of his career.’
Of ROBERT FERGUSSON, by DR. A. B. GROSART,
The _Westminster Gazette_ says:--
‘One of the most interesting of the “Famous Scots” Series is devoted
to “Robert Fergusson” the poet, to whom “the greater Robert,” as he
freely acknowledged, was under so many obligations. Dr. Grosart is
perhaps the best living authority on all that relates to the bard
of “The Farmer’s Ingle,” and he gives many new facts and corrects a
number of erroneous statements that have hitherto obtained currency
respecting him. We have read it with genuine pleasure.’
The _British Weekly_ says:--
‘It is a creditable, useful, and painstaking book, a genuine
contribution to Scottish literary history.’
The _North British Daily Mail_ says:--
‘The little volume is a thoroughly competent piece of work, and forms
a valuable addition to an excellent series.’
The _Weekly Scotsman_ says:--
‘The book will be welcomed as a worthy addition to that wonderfully
entertaining and instructive series of biographies, the “Famous Scots.”
Of JAMES THOMSON, by WILLIAM BAYNE,
The _Daily News_ says:--
‘A just appreciation of Thomson as poet and dramatist, and an
interesting record of the conditions under which he rose to fame, as
also of his friendships with the great ones of the eighteenth century.’
_Literature_ says:--
‘The story of Thomson’s claim to the disputed authorship of “Rule
Britannia” is sustained by his countryman with spirit, and in our
judgment with success.’
The _Publishers’ Circular_ says:--
‘The book is one which every lover of Thomson will welcome, and which
students of poetry cannot well afford to neglect.’
The _Spectator_ says:--
‘This is one of the compactest and best written volumes of the useful
series of biographies to which it belongs.’
Of MUNGO PARK, by T. BANKS MACLACHLAN,
The _Leeds Mercury_ says:--
‘We owe to Mr. Maclachlan not only a charming life-story, if at
times a pathetic one, but a vivid chapter in the romance of Africa.
Geography has no more wonderful tale than that dealing with the
unravelling of the mystery of the Niger.’
The _Speaker_ says:--
‘Mr. Maclachlan recounts with incisive vigour the story of Mungo
Park’s heroic wanderings and the services which he rendered to
geographical research.’
The _Kilmarnock Herald_ says:--
‘It is a thrilling story, powerfully told, of one of Scotland’s
noblest sons.’
The _Educational News_ says:--
‘Mungo Park has his record here summarised in such a manner as to win,
inform, and delight.’
Of DAVID HUME, by HENRY CALDERWOOD,
The _Speaker_ says:--
‘The little book is a virile recruit of the “Famous Scots Series.”’
‘This monograph is both picturesque and critical.’
The _New Age_ says:--
‘To the many students of philosophy in Scotland a special interest
will attach to Professor Calderwood’s sketch of David Hume from the
fact that it is the last piece of work done by its lamented author;
and very pleasing it is to note the fairness and charity of the
judgment passed by the most evangelical of philosophers upon the man
who used to be denounced as the prophet of infidelity.’
The _Scotsman_ says:--
‘Fulfils admirably well the purpose of the writer, which was that of
presenting in clear, fair, and concise lines Hume and his philosophy
to the mind of his countrymen and of the world.’
The _Publishers’ Circular_ says:--
‘This biography is well written, and it will no doubt be considered,
as it really is, one of the best of the “Famous Scots Series.”’
Of WILLIAM DUNBAR, by OLIPHANT SMEATON,
The _Speaker_ says:--
‘Mr. Smeaton looks narrowly into the characteristics of Dunbar’s
genius, and does well to insist on the almost Shakespearian range
of his gifts. He contends that in elegy, as well as in satire and
allegory, Dunbar’s place in English literature is amongst the great
masters of the craft of letters.’
The _Glasgow Herald_ says:--
‘This is a bright and picturesquely written monograph, presenting
in readable form the results of the critical research undertaken by
Laing, Schipper, and the other scholars who during the present century
have done so much for the elucidation of the greatest of our early
Scottish poets.’
The _Bailie_ says:--
‘A graphic and informed account not only of the man and his works, but
of his immediate environment and of the times in which he lived.’
The _Bookman_ says:--
‘The book is an admirable biography, one of the liveliest and most
readable in the series.’
Of SIR WILLIAM WALLACE, by Professor MURISON,
The _Speaker_ says:--
‘Mr. Murison is to be congratulated on this little book. After much
hard and discriminative labour he has pieced together by far the best,
one might say the only rational and coherent, account of Wallace that
exists.’
Mr. William Wallace in the _Academy_ says:--
‘Professor Murison has acquitted himself of his task like a patriot.’
‘Capital reading.’
The _Daily News_ says:--
‘A scholarly and impartial little volume, one of the best yet
published in the “Famous Scots Series.”’
The _Pall Mall Gazette_ says:--
‘A bright little book which will be much relished north of the Tweed,
and also among those Scottish exiles who are supposed to be pining
away their lives south of it.’
The _New Age_ says:--
‘Anyhow, here, at least, we have his life-story--a most difficult
tale to tell--recorded with a painstaking research and in a spirit of
appreciative candour which leave almost nothing to be desired.’
Of ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, by MARGARET MOYES BLACK,
The _Banffshire Journal_ says:--
‘The portrait, drawn as it is by a loving hand, is absolutely
photographic in its likeness, and the literary criticisms with which
the book is pleasantly studded are alike careful and judicious, and
with most of them the ordinary reader will cordially agree.’
The _Bookman_ says:--
‘This little book is sure to get a welcome.’
The _Speaker_ says:--
‘Sense and sensibility are in these pages, as well as knowledge and
delicate discrimination.’
The _Outlook_ says:--
‘Certainly one of the most charming biographies we have ever
come across. The writer has style, sympathy, distinction, and
understanding. We were loth to put the book aside. Its one fault is
that it is too short.’
The _Daily Free Press_ says:--
‘One of the most charming sketches--it is scarcely a biography--of a
literary man that could be found has just been published as the latest
number of the “Famous Scots Series”--“R. Louis Stevenson,” by Miss
Black. The excellence of the little book lies in its artless charm, in
its loose and easy style, in its author’s evident love and delight in
her subject.’
Of THOMAS REID, by Professor CAMPBELL FRASER,
The _North British Daily Mail_ says:--
‘A model of sympathetic appreciation and of succinct and lucid
exposition.’
The _Scotsman_ says:--
‘Professor Campbell Fraser’s volume on Thomas Reid is one of the
most able and valuable of an able and valuable series. He supplies
what must be allowed to be a distinct want in our literature, in the
shape of a brief, popular, and accessible biography of the founder
of the so-called Scottish School of Philosophy, written with notable
perspicuity and sympathy by one who has made a special study of the
problems that engaged the mind of Reid.’
The _Glasgow Herald_ says:--
‘We do not know any volume of the “Famous Scots Series” that deserves
or is likely to receive a heartier welcome from the educated public
than this life and estimate of Reid by Professor Campbell Fraser. The
writer is no amateur, but a past-master in the subject of Scottish
philosophy, and it has evidently been a real pleasure to him to
expiscate quite a number of new facts regarding the professional and
private life of its best representative.’
The _Pall Mall Gazette_ says:--
‘The little work is of high excellence--comprehensive in view, dear in
exposition, and exemplary in literary style.’
The _Saturday Review_ says:--
‘Mr. Campbell Fraser has added to the “Famous Scots Series” an
excellent little book on Reid and his philosophy, dealing lucidly with
the philosopher’s relations with contemporary thinkers and with modern
thought.’
Of POLLOK AND AYTOUN, by ROSALINE MASSON,
The _Spectator_ says:--
‘One of the most artistically conceived and gracefully written of the
series to which it belongs.’
The _Glasgow Herald_ says:--
‘The facts of the two lives are presented by Miss Masson with
intelligence and spirit, and the volume will take a good place among
the rest of the series.’
Of ADAM SMITH, by HECTOR C. MACPHERSON,
The _Speaker_ says:--
‘This little book is written with brains and a degree of courage which
is in keeping with its convictions. It has vision, too, and that
counts for righteousness, if anywhere, in political economy.’
The _Echo_ says:--
‘Smith’s life is briefly and clearly told, and there is a good deal
of independent criticism interspersed amidst the chapters on the
philosopher’s two principal treatises. Mr. Macpherson’s analysis of
Smith’s economic teaching makes excellent reading.’
The _Scots Pictorial_ says:--
‘One of the best of an admirable series.’
Mr. Herbert Spencer says:--
‘I have learned much from your sketch of Adam Smith’s life and
work. It presents the essential facts in a lucid and interesting
way. Especially am I glad to see that you have insisted upon the
individualistic character of his teaching. It is well that his
authority on the side of individualism should be put forward in these
days of rampant Socialism, when the great mass of legislative measures
extend public agency and restrict private agency; the advocates
of such measures being blind to the fact that by small steps they
are bringing about a state in which the citizen will have lost all
freedom.’
The _Glasgow Herald_ says:--
‘A sound and able piece of work, and contains a fair and discerning
estimate of Smith in his essential character as the author of the
doctrine of Free Trade, and consequently of the modern science of
economics.’
Of ANDREW MELVILLE, by WILLIAM MORISON,
The _Spectator_ says:--
‘The story is well told, and it takes one through a somewhat obscure
period with which it is well to be acquainted. No better guide could
be found than Mr. Morison.’
The _Speaker_ says:--
‘The great aspects of his career as Principal of Glasgow and then of
St. Andrews--it has been said that the European renown of the Scottish
Universities began with Melville--are admirably discussed in this
virile, and at the same time critical monograph.’
The _North British Daily Mail_ says:--
‘Mr. Morison outlines the main facts of Melville’s life-work with
singular lucidity and point. He displays a full and accurate knowledge
of the ecclesiastical history of the period, and his judgments are
invariably sound. Altogether the book is one of the best of the
series.’
The _British Weekly_ says:--
‘Mr. Morison writes with full knowledge of Scottish history, and also
with what is equally important, perfect sympathy with the strong men
who made it.’
The _Academy_ says:--
‘Mr. Morison has told Melville’s story with a care for accurate
history.’
Of JAMES FREDERICK FERRIER, by E. S. HALDANE,
The _Scotsman_ says:--
‘Ferrier the man, and even Ferrier the professor, Miss Haldane brings
near to us, an attractive and interesting figure.’
The _Pall Mall Gazette_ says:--
‘His splendid and transcendental thought and fine eloquence were so
inspiring and stimulating, and his personal charm was so fascinating,
that a study of the man must engage the sympathies of every
student. The author, who is already known for admirable work in the
philosophical field, has written an excellent exposition of Ferrier’s
views.’
Of KING ROBERT THE BRUCE, by Professor MURISON,
The _Morning Leader_ says:--
‘Professor Murison has given us a book for which not only Scots, but
every man who can appreciate a record of great days worthily told will
be grateful.’
The _Aberdeen Journal_ says:--
‘The story of Bruce is brilliantly told in clear and flexible
language, which draws the reader on with the interest of a novel.
Professor Murison is a most impartial and thoroughly reliable critic,
and may be followed with confidence by all who desire a truthful and
unprejudiced picture of this greatest of the Scots.’
The _Leeds Mercury_ says:--
‘A worthy, as it is a necessary, addition to an admirable series.’
The _Speaker_ says:--
‘He has sifted for himself State records, official papers, old
chronicles, and has come to his own conclusions without the aid of
modern historians. Therein lies the value of the book: it is a fresh,
independent, critical estimate of a man who emancipated Scotland from
a thraldom which was almost worse than death. Bruce’s career from
first to last is described in these pages with uncompromised fidelity,
and no attempt is made to gloss over the faults of a masterful nature.’
The _Morning Leader_ says:--
‘Professor Murison has given us a book for which not only Scots, but
every man who can appreciate a record of great days worthily told,
will be grateful.’
Of JAMES HOGG, THE ETTRICK SHEPHERD, by Sir GEORGE DOUGLAS,
The _Scotsman_ says:--
‘Sir George Douglas has contributed a gracefully written and well-knit
biography of the Ettrick Shepherd to the “Famous Scots” Series. It
follows in a spirit of kindly criticism the steps of Hogg through the
shadow and sunshine, the failures and successes of his career, from
the hillsides of Yarrow and Ettrick to the more slippery places of the
world of literature, and back again to the solitude of the forest; and
it gives us judicious and sympathetic appreciations of his work in
prose and in verse, much of it already fallen into unmerited neglect.’
The _New Age_ says:--
‘A capital biography--full, careful, discriminating, and sympathetic.’
The _Daily News_ says:--
‘The story of James Hogg’s manly, honourable battle with poverty,
and of his literary achievement, is excellently told by Sir George
Douglas.’
The _Expository Times_ says:--
‘The book is accurate, and must have cost research, but it is written
in a pleasant gossipy manner, quite as if Hogg had flung the flavour
of Hogg’s writings over his biographer.’
_Saint Andrew_ says:--
‘We have no hesitation in saying that this valuable and interesting
volume will be welcomed by the Scots people as heartily as any that
have preceded it.’
Of THOMAS CAMPBELL, by J. CUTHBERT HADDEN,
The _Scotsman_ says:--
‘A very useful, compact, well-digested, and well-written account of
Campbell’s career and literary labours.’
Transcriber’s Note
In the Daily Chronicle’s review of SIR JAMES YOUNG SIMPSON, by Eve
Blantyre Simpson, “superflous” has been changed to “superfluous”.