This was in the end of the year 1539, when Buchanan had attained the age

of thirty-three. His residence in the capital of the famous province of

Gascony seems to have been active and happy. He was Professor of Latin

in the college; perhaps the terms would be more just if we said he was

Latin master in one of the most flourishing and successful of French

schools; but our neighbours still prefer the more high-sounding

nomenclature. The great Garonne was not full of ships and trade at that

period as it is now; but Bordeaux was one of the old capital cities of

France, possessing a rank which now belongs to no French provincial

town, and had its own characteristic society, its scholars and

provincial statesmen. But the most important and notable human being of

all whom Buchanan found in his new sphere was a certain small seigneur

of Gascony, six years old, and already an accomplished Latinist, having

learned no other language from his cradle, bearing the name of Michel de

Montaigne and already a little philosopher as well as scholar. The great

essayist speaks afterwards of "George Buchanan, the celebrated Scotch

poet," as one of his masters, but he does not say whether Buchanan was

the enlightened pedagogue who connived at his endless reading and let

him off as much as was possible from other less congenial studies.

Buchanan, however, must have found the cheerful southern city, with its

Parliament and its colleges, and all the teeming life and restless

energies of the Gascon race, not unlike a kind of warmer and more

brilliant Scotland, full of national brag and gallantry, a congenial

sphere. He had been for a long time shedding complimentary verses,

sonnets, dedications, about him after the manner of the time, serving

out to everybody who was kind to him a little immortality in the shape

of classic thanks or compliment: but in Bordeaux he began to produce

works of more apparent importance, "four tragedies" intended primarily

for the use of his college, where it was the custom to represent yearly

a play, generally of an allegorical character--one of the fantastical

miracle plays which delighted the time, and which were often as profane

in reality as they were religious in pretence. The great classicist

considered his boys to be wasting their faculties in representing such

inferior performances, but humoured the prevailing taste so much as to

choose two Scriptural subjects, Jephthah and John the Baptist,

alternately with the Medea and Alcestis. He "was successful beyond his

hopes," he says, in these efforts. In all of the plays the little

Montaigne was one of the chief performers. "Before a fit age, _Alter ab

undecimo tum me vix ceperat annus_," says that great writer, "I

sustained the first parts in the Latin tragedies of Buchanan, which were

played in our College de Guienne, with dignity." The little scene is

pleasant to think of, not too long out of date to recall the scholastic

pastimes of to-day, though there is no Buchanan to produce plays for

Eton or Harrow, and probably no young Montaigne to play the hero. The

learned Scot, with his peasant breeding no doubt making him still more

conscious of the strain of gentle blood in his veins, a little rough,

irascible, and impatient in nature, notwithstanding the elegance of his

Latin speech, and the little noble, gentilhomme to his fingers' end,

half respectful, half contemptuous of the pedagogue, make a picturesque

contrast.

Buchanan, however, did not feel himself safe even in Bordeaux, where he

remained only three years. It is said that Cardinal Beatoun wrote to the

Archbishop recommending his arrest, and the Franciscan community in the

Gascon city, which had heard from their brethren of his offences against

the Order, kept an unfriendly eye upon him, ready to take advantage of

any hostile opportunity. He therefore returned to Paris, where in a

similar but apparently more obscure position he spent some years. In

1547 he was very glad to accompany Govra, who had brought him to

Bordeaux, and whom Montaigne describes as "beyond comparison the

greatest Principal in France," to his native country Portugal, whither

his King had summoned him in order that his talents might be of use to

his own nation as the head of the new University of Coimbra. It would

seem that Govra carried his whole staff along with him to Portugal.

"Most of them," Buchanan says, "were men bound to him (Buchanan) for

many years in the ties of closest friendship, men who were renowned for

their works all over the world," and in whose society the Scottish

scholar felt that he would be not among strangers but among kinsmen and

friends. A still stronger inducement was, that while all Europe was

ablaze with wars and religious controversies, that one little kingdom

was at peace. The band of scholars thus removed together to their new

sphere, like a hive of bees, and at first all went well with them; but

they had not been long in Portugal when Govra died, leaving them without

any powerful patronage or protection, a band of strangers, no doubt

appearing in the aspect of supplanters of native talent to many hostile

lookers-on. Men of their pursuits and modes of thought, aliens in an

unknown country, perhaps sufficiently free of speech to alarm the

narrow-minded, no great observers of ritual or ceremony, were too likely

under any circumstances to attract the notice of the Inquisition in a

place so wholly given over to its sway.

Buchanan was probably the most distinguished among this band of

scholars; and a vague report that he had written something against the

Franciscans attached to him a special prejudice. As nobody knew what

this work was, it could not be brought formally against him, but lesser

crimes were found, such as that of eating meat in Lent and speaking

disrespectfully of monks, sins which even in Portugal most people were

more or less guilty of. Buchanan, however, had no very dreadful penalty

to bear. He was imprisoned for some months in a monastery, that he might

be brought by the monks' instruction to a better way of thinking. The

prisoner was fair enough to admit that he found his jailors by no means

bad men or unkindly in their treatment of him--an acknowledgment which

is greatly to his credit, since prejudice was equally strong on both

sides and a persecuted scholar was as little apt to see the good

qualities of his persecutors as they were to accept his satires. It

would be interesting to know what the homely fathers thought of him,

this dreadful freethinker and satirist committed to their care for

instruction. He found them "entirely ignorant of religious questions,"

though evidently so much less hostile than he had expected, and occupied

his enforced leisure in making his translation of the Psalms, a monument

of elegant verse and fine Latinity, for which the quiet of the convent

and the absence of interruptions must have been most favourable. He

would seem to have corrected the bad impression he had at first made, by

these devout studies and his behaviour generally; for when he was

released the King would not let him go, but gave him a daily allowance

for his expenses until some fit position could be found for him. But

there was evidently nothing in Lisbon which tempted Buchanan to stay. He

languished in the little capital separated from all congenial society,

and sighed for his beloved Paris which he addressed as his mistress,

writing a poem, _Desiderium Lutetiae_, in praise of and longing for the

presence of that nymph whom so many have wooed.

At last he contrived to escape in a ship bound for England, which,

however, he found as little congenial as Portugal, and with as short a

delay as possible he returned to that Lutetia which he loved. Arrived

there, he would seem to have resumed his old work as schoolmaster in one

of the colleges, no way advanced, despite his fame and adventures, from

the first post he had held when little more than a boy, though he was

now between forty and fifty, and one of the best-known scholars of his

time. A few years later he became a member of the household of the

Marechal de Brissac as tutor to his son, and with him spent five years,

partly in Italy in the province of Liguria where the Marechal was

governor. For the first time he would seem to have been treated with

honour, and his advice taken in affairs of state and public business

generally, and here he tells us he devoted much of his time to the study

of sacred literature, so that he might be able to form a matured

judgment as to the controversies which were tearing the world asunder.

In the year 1560, his services being no longer required by his pupil,

Buchanan at last decided upon returning to his native country. "The

despotism of the Guises," he says, "was over, and the religious

excitement had begun to calm down." It would appear that though his

convictions had so long been on the side of the Reform, he had not yet

publicly made himself known as a member of that party. And his return to

Scotland was made with the full intention so to do.

Such was the wandering and uncertain career of the scholar and man of

letters of the sixteenth century. Perhaps Buchanan's temper was less

compliant, his character less easily adaptable to the society in which

he found himself, than most; but it may be doubted whether this was the

cause of the very small advancement in life to which he had come, since

he was complaisant enough to indite many fine verses in praise of people

who gave him a banquet or a shelter, and he seems to have gone nowhere

without making friends. He had got abundant reputation, however, if not

much else, and was known wherever he went as the celebrated poet, which

doubtless was agreeable to him if not very profitable. But it gives us a

certain insight into the life of the literary class in his time to see

so notable a man wandering from one place to another, professor or

regent or private tutor as it happened, never well off, never secure,

often in the position of a dependant. When Milton speaks of the

"others," poets whom he thus adopts into a kind of equality, who "use"

"To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,

Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair,"

it is supposed to be Buchanan whom he refers to, which is perhaps honour

enough for a modern classicist; though Amaryllis, the critics say, was

no more individual a love than the Lutetia before mentioned, for whom he

pined. Yet though all the scholars of his time admired and followed him,

he had to return again and again to his Latin grammar, and to small boys

not so wonderful as Michel of Montaigne; and when he returned to

Edinburgh at the age of fifty-five his worldly position was scarcely

better than when he got his first appointment at twenty-one to the

College of St. Barbe. His life was now, however, to take another form.

Buchanan's return to Scotland "after the despotism of the Guises was

over" corresponded very nearly with the return of Queen Mary. It is

surmised that he may have travelled in the suite of "the Lord James,"

the future Earl of Murray, who paid his sister a visit very soon after

the death of her husband, King Francis: certainly nothing could be more

probable than that the Scotch scholar, seeking an opportunity to return

to his native country, should have joined himself to the train of the

prince, who probably had been acquainted in his childhood with his

brother's tutor, and who was himself a man of education and a patron of

literature. If this guess should be correct it would account for

Buchanan's rapid promotion to Court favour. Edinburgh was in a state of

happy expectation when the poet came back. What was virtually a new

reign, though Mary had been the nominal possessor of the throne from her

birth, was about to begin; the fame of the young Queen had no doubt been

blown far and wide about the country on every breeze--that fame of

beauty, sweetness, and grace which is the most universally attractive of

all reputations, and which made the proud Scots prouder still in the

possession of such a prodigy. That there were graver thoughts among the

very serious and important party, who felt the safety of their

newly-established and severely-reformed Church to be in doubt if not in

danger, and who hated and feared "the mass" and the priests who

performed it as they did the devil (with whom indeed they were more

amiably familiar), does not alter the fact that the anticipation of

Mary's return was a happy one, and her welcome cordial and without

drawback. Nobody knew that there had been a project of a landing at

Aberdeen, where Huntly and the other northern lords had proposed to meet

her with twenty thousand men, thus enabling her to march upon her

capital as a conquering heroine of the old faith, putting Satan, in the

shape of John Knox, under her feet. Had she accepted this proposal how

strangely might the face of history have been changed! But there is no

reason to suppose that Mary desired to come to Scotland with fire and

flame, any more than there is that her destruction was a foregone

conclusion. She came with many prognostics of success, though also with

a continual possibility that "terrible tragedies" might come of it; and

for some time it would appear that her Court was as seemly and pleasant

as any Court could be, full of youthful pleasure and delight as became

her years and the gay youthful company that surrounded her, but also of

graver matters and thoughts and purposes becoming a noble Queen.

The first notice we have of Buchanan after his return to Scotland is

conveyed in a letter from Randolph, the English envoy in Edinburgh, in

which the question, "Who is fittest to be sent from this Queen to

attende upon the Queen's Majesty (Elizabeth) for the better continuance

of intelligence with her Highness?" is discussed. "Of any that I know,"

says the representative of England, "David Forrest is likeliest, and

most desireth it. There is with the Queen one called Mr. George

Buchanan, a Scottishe man very well learned that was schollemaster unto

Monsieur de Brissac's son, very godly and honest, whom I have always

judged fitter than any other I know." This was written in January 1562,

and shows that Buchanan was at that time about the Court and in the way

of employment, though he was not then chosen as confidential messenger

between the two queens. A little later he is visible in the exercise of

his old vocation as the tutor of Mary herself. "The Queen readeth daily

after her dinner," says the same careful narrator, "instructed by a

learned man, Mr. George Buchanan, somewhat of Lyvie." These few words

set before us a curious scene. Mary at the height of her good

resolutions and good beginning, keeping up her literature as well as all

her pleasures, her hunting, her riding, her music, her embroideries, all

the accomplishments of her royal training--makes a delightful picture.

She had the habit of working with her needle like any innocent lady in

her bower, while the lords of her Council, grim lords whom it is strange

to associate with this pretty pose of royal simplicity, discussed around

her the troublous affairs of the most turbulent kingdom in Christendom:

and after her dinner, in the languor of the afternoon, one wonders if

the lovely lady was diligent over her Livy or rather seduced her

preceptor to talk about Paris, that much-desired Lutetia which he had so

longed for, as no doubt in the bottom of her heart she too was sometimes

doing. The two so unlike each other--the beautiful young princess not

quite twenty, the old scholar and schoolmaster though a poet withal,

drawing near the extreme boundaries of middle age, and worn with much

struggling against the world and poverty--would yet find a subject and

mutual interest far apart from the book, which made endless conversation

possible, and many a pleasant comparison of experiences so different.

Buchanan had dedicated a book to one of those fair and famous Margarets

who adorned Paris at that epoch, and presumably knew her or something of

her state, and could understand her Majesty of Scotland's allusions, and

knew something of the gossip of the Court, or at least could pretend to

do so, as a man who was aware what was expected of a courtier. It is

possible indeed that Mary was truly studious, and liked her Livy as her

contemporary did, the gentle Lady Jane who had so sad a fate; but it is

much more likely, we think, that the big volume lay open, while the

scholar's eyes glowed and shone with cherished reminiscences of that

enchanting city in which his best days had flown, and Mary Stewart

responded to his recollections with all her gay wit and charm of

pleasant speech. Many are the tragic associations of Holyrood: it is

well to note that other companions more sober than Signor Davie, more

calm than Chastelar, shared now and then the Queen's leisure. Grave

commentators conclude that it spoke well for her Majesty's Latinity that

Buchanan put her on Livy; for my part I have no doubt that these two

unlikely gossips, after perhaps a sentence or two, forgot about Livy,

and talked of their Paris all the time.

Buchanan took the opportunity of this quiet and prosperous period, when

all was hopeful in the nation as well as in his own prospects, to

publish the poetical version of the Psalms which had occupied his

enforced leisure in the Portuguese monastery years before. They had not

yet seen the light in a complete form, although several of them had been

included by the well-known printer Etienne, or Stephanus as he is more

generally called, in a collection of similar translations by several

learned hands, among which he gives in a flattering preface by far the

highest place to Buchanan. The terms of laudation in which he speaks,

and which it was the fashion of the time to employ, may be judged from

the following extracts quoted by Irving. After commenting upon the

general excellence of his friend's work, superior to all others, he

adds,--

"There is nothing more honourable, nothing more splendid, than after

excelling all others, at length to excel one's self; so in my

judgment you have most happily attained to this praise in your

version of these psalms. For in translating the other odes of this

sacred poet, you have been Buchanan, that is, you have been as

conspicuous among the other paraphrasists as the moon among the

smaller luminaries; but when you come to the hundred and fourth

psalm you surpass Buchanan; so that you do not now shine like the

moon among the lesser luminaries but like the sun you seem to

obscure all the stars by your brilliant rays."

The community of letters in these days was in the habit of expressing

the intensest mutual admiration, except when a contrary feeling not less

strong animated their minds and pens. Buchanan dedicated his psalms to

his beautiful pupil and patron in terms as highflown but more elegant,

and with a justifiable wealth of hyperbolical adulation. It would be an

undue demand upon humanity to require nothing more than plain fact in a

poetical address to a young Sovereign so gracious, so accomplished, and

so fair. And yet in the extraordinary circumstances, so soon to be

swallowed up in the abyss of a catastrophe still more extraordinary,

there is little extravagance in Buchanan's address, of which we shall

attempt a translation though most unworthy.

"Lady, who bears the sceptre of this land

By endless forefathers transmitted down,

Whose worth exceeds thy fortune far, as stand

Thy virtues o'er thy years, and the renown

Of noble gifts over thy noble line,

And spirit o'er thy sex:--without a frown

Accept in this poor Latin garb of mine

The noble songs of Israel's prophet king.

Far from Parnassus and the classic shore,

From under northern stars my gift I bring;

Nor had I ventured such an ill-born thing

To lay before thee, but for fearing more

To miss the little chance of pleasing thee,

Whose understanding gives a merit not in me."

Buchanan followed this publication by various others, and strangely

enough, while still enjoying the royal favour brought out his

_Franciscanus_, his _Fratres Fraterrimi_, and other satires specially

directed against the monks: which, however, seem to have done him no

harm, for he talks in 1567 of "the occupations of a court," which kept

him from bestowing the time and trouble he wished on the preparation of

his various books for the press. Whether the readings from Livy went on

all this time we have no record; but when Queen Mary married Darnley,

and when her son was born, Buchanan would still seem to have occupied

the position of Court poet, and celebrated both events by copies of

verses as flattering, as well as elegant, as the dedication. From the

first of these we may quote the lines in which Buchanan proves,

notwithstanding his long absence and cosmopolitan training, that the

native brag of the Scot was as strong in him as if he had never left his

native shores. It could scarcely be to flatter either of the bridal pair

that he burst forth into this celebration of "the ancient Kingdom."

"For herein lies the glory of the Scot,

To fill the woods with clamour of the chase;

To swim the stream, and cold and heat defy,

And hunger and fatigue. To guard their land

Not with deep trench or wall, but with the force

Of arms, contemning life for honour's sake;

To keep their troth, to reverence the bonds

Of friendship, to love virtue and not gifts.

Such acts as these secured throughout the land

Freedom and peace, when war raged o'er the world,

And every other nation was constrained

To change its native laws for foreign yoke,

The fury of the Goth stopped here; the onslaught fierce

Of the strong Saxon, and the tribes more strong,

The Dane and Norman, who had conquered him,

Nay, in our ancient annals live the tales

Of Roman victory stayed--the Latin tide

Which neither south wind checked, nor Parthia bleak,

Nor waves of Meroi, nor the rushing Rhine,

Was here arrested by this only race

Before whose face the Roman paused and held

The frontier of his empire, not by lines

Of hill and river, but by walls and towns,

By Caledonian axes oft assailed,

Laying all hope of further gain aside."

In the meantime, while these poetical performances went on, and the

scholar occupied his leisure in preparing for publication his scattered

works--an occupation which of itself proved the quiet and good hope in

which he was living--more serious labours also occupied his mind.

Notwithstanding his tutorship at Court, Buchanan took advantage of the

moment to declare himself an adherent of the newly formed and very

belligerent Church, now settled and accepted on the basis of the

Reformation, but with little favour at Court as has been seen. He not

only put himself and his erudition at once on that side in the most open

and public way, but sat in the General Assembly, or at least in one of

the Assemblies which preceded the formal creation of that great

ecclesiastical parliament, in 1563, less than two years after his

arrival in Scotland. Nor was his position that of a simple member taking

part in the debates; he seems to have sat upon various special

committees, and to have been entrusted, along with several others, to

revise the Book of Discipline, the standard of order and governance: and

this while he was still a courtier, Mary's tutor and gossip, holding his

place in her presence, and celebrating the events of the time in courtly

and scholarly verse--a curious instance of toleration in a time which

scarcely knew its name.

To recompense Buchanan's services Queen Mary granted him, in the year

1564, an allowance from the forfeited Church property, making him

pensioner of the Abbey of Crossraguel, with an income of five hundred

pounds Scots--a sum very different, it need not be said, from the same

sum in English money. The abbey had been held by a Kennedy, the brother

of Buchanan's first pupil, the Earl of Cassilis, and very probably he

had thus some knowledge of and connection with the locality, where he

had gone with Cassilis many years before. The grant would seem for some

years to have profited him little, the then Earl of Cassilis, son of his

gentler Gilbert, having little inclination to let go his hold of the

rents which his uncle had drawn, either in favour of a new abbot or of

the pensioner; and the cruelties with which this fierce Ayrshire lord

treated the functionary who succeeded his uncle seem incredible to hear

of. George Buchanan kept out of his clutches; but it was not till some

years afterwards that we find the local tyrant bound over in sureties to

leave the two lawful proprietors of these funds alone. So far as can be

made out, Mary's grant to Buchanan was almost identical in date with the

publication of the Psalms and the sonnet which he placed at their head:

a graceful and royal return for the compliment, quite in harmony with

the customs of the time. Both events occurred, as would appear, in the

year 1564, when all was still well with the unfortunate Queen.

Buchanan has been accused of great ingratitude to Mary, because at one

time he served and flattered her, and received as a recompense for the

incense he offered, a substantial benefit: but afterwards turned from

her party to that of her brother, and condemned her with unsparing blame

in his History, as well as acted against her after her downfall. But the

ingratitude is quite incapable of proof. To be devoted to a royal

personage in his or her youth, and to maintain unbroken, however he or

she may change, this early devotion through evil and through good

report, is a romantic grace which is given to few. It was given to very

few of those who received with enthusiasm the young Queen of Scotland,

when she came unsullied, with all her natural fascination and charm,

into the country which hoped everything from her, yet knew nothing of

her. After the half-dozen years of disaster and tragedy, of which a much

greater number of her people believed her the guilty cause than the

innocent victim, there were few indeed who maintained their faith. And

Buchanan was neither romantic nor young; he had none of the elements of

an enthusiast in him. A caustic man of the world, a self-absorbed

scholar without domestic ties or usage in the art of loving, it would

have been wonderful indeed had he constituted himself the champion of

his beautiful pupil in her terrible adversity because she had shown him

a little favour and he had laid poetical homages at her feet in a

brighter time. It would be hard indeed if such a passage of mutual good

offices were to bind a man's judgment for ever, and prevent him from

exercising the right of choosing whom he will serve to all time. Mary's

bounty would suffice to give to her tutor the independence which he had

struggled for all his life, if it had been paid; but it was not paid for

several years; and it was a bounty which cost the giver nothing, so that

the claim for eternal gratitude is overweening in any case.

At the same time, both then and ever, Buchanan's patron and backer was

the Lord James, a man with whom he was very much more likely to find

himself in sympathy than with the young Queen. A grave temper and some

learning, and also the charm of early association, would naturally

attract the elderly scholar more than Mary's feminine gifts, however

great their charm. It was Murray, no doubt, who presented him to the

Queen, and procured him his position at Court; and just as the tragic

moment approached, when Mary's brilliant life was about to plunge into

darkness, Murray bestowed on Buchanan the place of all others best

suited for him, and to which his whole previous existence tended--that

of Principal of the College of St. Leonard's in the University of St.

Andrews. A more fit position, as the best field for his great gifts and

dignified retirement for his old age, could not be imagined. Buchanan

was sixty; he was of all the scholars of his time _facile princeps_,

according to the opinion of the great French printer and scholar, whose

expressions were adopted in the register of the University as describing

the qualifications of the new Principal. It might well have been

supposed that in the reconstitution and improvement of that old

University, in the supervision of his students, in the periodical visit

to Edinburgh for Church matters or educational duties, which has

afforded the necessary relaxation to many a succeeding principal, the

peaceful days of the greatest scholar in Europe would now have passed

tranquilly, until he found his resting-place, like so many others, under

the soft green mantle of the turf which, broken only by solemn

mounds--the last traces of individuality--encircled the great Cathedral

of St. Andrews as it now encircles the ruins of that once splendid

shrine.

The events of the time, however, permitted no such dignified and calm

conclusion. One can imagine the horror and dismay with which the little

community at St. Andrews heard the dreadful news, carried far and wide

on every breeze, with every kind of whispered comment and

suggestion--soon to be no longer whispered with pale face and bated

breath, but proclaimed from the housetops--of Darnley's murder. Buchanan

had poured forth his celebrations of Mary's marriage and of the birth of

the heir while still a member of her household. And no doubt he had

become aware of the dissensions in that royal house, of Darnley's

ingratitude and folly and the Queen's impatience, before he escaped from

all the talk and endless gossip to the quiet of his college. But it

would seem equally clear that when the action of the sombre tragedy

quickened he was absent from the scene and knew of it only by the

rumours and reports that came across the Firth. First Rizzio's murder,

which the distant spectators would discuss, no doubt, with a thrill not

entirely of horror, a stern sense that justice had been done, a

satisfied prejudice--and no doubt some patriotic, if still prejudiced,

hope that now the Italian was removed there would be less of foreign

policy, and a more entire regard for the welfare of affairs at home.

Then would come the rumours of the Queen's vengeance, lightly held at

first, of Bothwell always in the foreground, her chief supporter and

partisan--Bothwell who, though loved by nobody, was yet a Protestant,

and therefore not altogether beyond hope. And then with ever-quickening

haste event after event--the murder of the King, for whom no one would

have mourned much had it been attended by circumstances less terrible;

the mad proceedings of the Queen, whether constrained or free, her

captivity, outrage, or conspiracy, whichever it was, her insane and

incomprehensible marriage, which no force or persuasion could account

for. As the posts arrived at uncertain intervals, delayed by weather,

strong winds and heavy seas, by breaking down of conveyances, by the

very agitations and tumults in the capital which made them so terribly

interesting, the eager spectators in Fife must have congregated to await

their arrival with an intensity of excitement, of which, with our

endless sources of information and constant communication, we can form

little idea now.

And there would seem to be no doubt of the strong immediate feeling

which arose against the Queen, the instant conclusion of the bystanders

as to her guilt. There have been no greater fluctuations in historical

opinion than those that have arisen around the facts of Mary's life.

Historians of the eighteenth century considered it as a test of a man's

moral sanity whether he persisted in believing in Mary's innocence or

not. Among her contemporaries the progress of time which softened

impression, and the many pathetic situations of her later history, the

terrible misfortunes under which she fell, her endless miseries and

troubles, and the brave spirit with which she met them, turned some

hearts again towards her, an ever-troubled but ever-devoted body of

partisans. But at the moment when these terrible events occurred there

can be little doubt that the horror and condemnation were almost

unanimous. No reasoning could explain away those wild and mad acts, no

discussion of probability come in. The mob in Edinburgh which raged

against her was checked in its fierceness and subdued to pity at sight

of the wretched lady in her despair, at that awful moment when she

appeared at the window of the Provost's lodging in the High Street, and

made her wild appeal, in all the force of impassioned and terrible

emotion, to the overawed and excited crowd. They saw her in the

carelessness of misery half-dressed, unadorned, disenchanted, and

delivered from the maddening delusion which had carried her away,

recognising in its full extent the horrors of the result--and their

hearts were rent with pity. But notwithstanding that pity and all the

innate chivalry which her sufferings called forth, Edinburgh and

Scotland, the whole alarmed and terrified nation, believed at first the

evidence of their senses. There seems nothing more distinct than this

fact throughout all the trouble and tumult of the moment. It is not to

be taken as an absolute proof of Mary's guilt. Such impressions have

existed in other though less conspicuous cases and have been proved

untrue. But that it did exist universally there can be little doubt.

The scene at the window of the Provost's lodging where the unfortunate

Queen was lodged, near the Nether Bow of Edinburgh, when brought back

from Dunbar after the flight of Bothwell by the angry lords, with the

mob clamouring underneath, and her enemies holding her fate in their

hands, seems to me one of the most significant in her history. No woman

was ever in circumstances more terrible. The situation is stronger if we

suppose her guilt, and that what we see before us is a great spirit

carried away by passion--that something beyond reason, beyond all human

power to restrain, which sometimes binds an angelic woman to a villain,

and sometimes a man of the highest power and wisdom to a lovely trifler

or a fool. It seems to me as at once more consistent with the facts and

with human nature to realise the position of the unhappy Queen as

transported by that overwhelming sentiment, and wrought on the other

side to an impatience almost maddening, by the injuries, follies,

treacheries, and universal provocation of her unworthy husband, until

the force of the bewildering current carried her in a disastrous moment

over a precipice worse than any Niagara, in a headlong course of mingled

misery, exasperation, love, and despair. Before she had even

accomplished the terrible circle of events, and become Bothwell's wife,

it requires no strong effort of the imagination to perceive that the

despair might well have come uppermost, and that Mary fully recognised,

not only the horror, but the futility and wretched failure into which

she had plunged. We do not pretend to believe that there was much to

cause remorse in the mind of such a woman in such an age in the death,

however brought about, of the miserable Darnley. Mary could have brushed

him from her memory like a fly, had that been all. But the rage of

despair and failure was in her soul when she raved like a caged lion

from door to window, imprisoned, trapped, and betrayed, expressing her

incoherent transport of pain to the mob which would have had her blood,

but which, overcome by the spectacle of that supreme and awful passion,

became silent with awe or hushed by a spasm of pity and tears.

So it has remained, a spectacle to all the earth, which the fiercest

assailant and the most rigid judge cannot long contemplate without

yielding to a painful compassion which rends the heart. Why should all

that faculty and force, all that wonderful being, with every capacity

for happiness and making happy, for wise action and beneficent dealing,

for boundless influence and power--why such youth, such strength, such

spirit, equal to every enterprise, should they have been swept away by

that remorseless fate? We can still see the trapped and ruined

Queen--exasperated still further by the consciousness that many of the

men now holding her in bonds were at least as guilty as she, guilty of

Darnley's blood, guilty if not of favouring yet of fearing Bothwell and

yielding their countenance to his plans--pacing that chamber, appearing

at that window, her loveliness, her adornments, and all the wiles of

triumphant beauty forgotten, throwing forth to the earth that was as

brass and the skies that were as iron, like a wild animal in its

torment, her hoarse inarticulate cry. And, whatever we may think of her

merits, that terrible spectacle is more than flesh and blood can bear.

Pity takes the place of wrath and indignation that she alone should

suffer: why not Lethington, Huntly, Athole, and the rest, all those

stern peers who counselled with her upon the most effectual way of

having Darnley removed, the thankless fool who disturbed every man's

peace--why were not they tried along with her, they who took such high

ground as her judges? Why should she bear the brunt of all? Even

Bothwell had escaped, and Mary stood at the bar of the world alone.

But such thoughts would not seem to have moved the first spectators, to

whom all that damning sequence of events, one precipitated on the heels

of another, came fresh as they occurred day by day. As for Buchanan, he

would be less prone to doubt than any. He knew something of the Court of

France and of the atmosphere in which Mary had received her training. He

was acquainted with many a royal scandal, and had much experience of a

world in which vice was the rule and good behaviour a mere exception,

due to a cold temperament, or a wariness uncongenial to generous youth.

Such an old man of the world is slow to believe in innocence at all, and

it is very likely that to him who knew her so well it was impossible to

conceive of Mary as an example of weak but spotless virtue. The

Principal of St. Leonard's went over to Edinburgh a few days after the

completion of that tragic chapter, when Mary had been consigned to

Lochleven, and Murray had assumed the Regency. The city was still

agitated by much discussion of the dreadful questions which occupied all

minds yet was slowly calming down like an angry sea, with long seethings

and swellings of excitement. The object of Buchanan's visit was not

curiosity or desire to be in the centre of that excitement, but a

simpler matter, which has drawn many a Principal of St. Andrews since to

the capital of Scotland, an Assembly of the Church, which opened "in the

Nether Tolbooth" on the 25th of June. Of this Assembly he, though a

layman, was appointed Moderator "for eschewing of confusion in

reasoning"--a curious motive, which proves at least that his

contemporaries had great confidence in his judgment, and also that the

passion of this excited and tumultuous time ran so high in the Church

that a stronger authority than usual was wanted to keep it within

bounds. The sentiment of the Church, or at least of the dominant party

in it, would seem to have been rather satisfaction that the Sovereign,

foreign alike in training and religion, had been set aside than any

distress at the cause. The Assembly congratulates itself that "this

present has offered some better occasion than in times bygane, and has

begun to tread down Satan under foot," which is not a very amiable

deliverance: but kindness and charity were not the Christian virtues

most approved in those days.

From this time Buchanan took up with vehemence, and indeed with

violence, the prosecution of Mary, acting often as her accuser, and

always as an active agent, secretary, or commissioner, in the conduct of

the indictment against her. He has been subject on this account to very

hard treatment especially from the recent defenders of the Queen. Mr.

Hosack, in his able book _Mary Queen of Scots and her Accusers_,

denounces him as having offered verses and adulations to the Queen at a

time when, according to his own after-statement, everybody knew her to

be living in shameless vice and corruption. This, however, is not at all

a necessary inference. It might, on the contrary, very well have lent

bitterness to Buchanan's historical record, written after the dreadful

catastrophe which so many accepted as a revelation of Mary's real

character, that he had himself been one of the deceived, who for years

had entertained no suspicion, but accepted the fair seeming as truth.

Such a sentiment is one of the most common in human nature. The friend

deceived becomes the bitterest enemy; and he who has been seduced into

undeserved approval is apt to go farther than the fiercest adversary

when he learns that his own utterances have helped to veil the crime

which he had never suspected the existence of. This motive is enough, we

think, to account for the special virulence with which Buchanan

certainly does assail the Queen, and the passion which thrills through

the _Detectio_, a sort of fury and abhorrence which makes every

paragraph tingle. She had done nothing to Buchanan to rouse any desire

for individual vengeance; and it is more rational, certainly, to believe

that the horror of the discovery inspired with a sort of rage the bosom

of the scholar--rage which was perfectly genuine in its beginning,

though it might, no doubt, be raised to whiter heat by the continually

increasing fervour of partisanship. The curious description of him given

by Sir James Melville (the courtier, not the divine) that "he was easily

abused, and so facile that he was led with any company that he haunted

for the time, which made him factious in his old days; for he spoke and

writ as they that were about him for the time informed him," would, if

accepted, give a still easier solution to this question. But it is a

little difficult to accept such a character of Buchanan, who does not

seem to have been a man easily put off from his own way, especially when

taken in conjunction with the Assembly's minute, recording his election

as president "for eschewing of confusion in reasoning." It is more easy

to believe the statement that he was "extreme vengeable against any man

that offended him, which was his greatest fault."

The much darker accusation against Buchanan, that he was a party to, or

indeed the most active agent in, the forging of certain letters reported

to have been sent by Mary to Bothwell before Darnley's murder, and known

far and wide as the Casket Letters, seems to rest upon nothing but

conjecture. He was one of the few members of the party who possessed the

literary gift, the only one, perhaps, except Lethington, whom Mr.

Skelton has presented to us as not only a very enlightened statesman,

but at all times the faithful servant of Mary, but who is accused by

earlier writers of much tergiversation and falsehood. He it was,

according to Chalmers, who was the forger, reaching the summit of

wickedness "in forging his mistress's handwriting for the odious purpose

of convicting her of the crime of aggravated murder." Chalmers was as

sturdy a champion of Mary's innocence in the eighteenth as Mr. Skelton

is in the nineteenth century, but the conduct of historical research has

very much altered in the meantime. The changes have been rung between

Lethington and Buchanan by various critics, but the last light upon the

subject seems to be that there is none, and that if the letters were

forged the forger at least cannot be identified by any art known to

history.

It is unnecessary to pursue the question, or to bring further arguments

to prove that nothing else in Buchanan's writings indicates the

possession of such dramatic and constructive power as would be necessary

for the production of such a letter as that professedly written from

Glasgow, which is by far the most important of the contents of the

Casket. A woman's distracted soul, divided between passion and shame,

the very exaltation of guilty self-abandonment and the horror of

conscious depravity and despair, is not a thing which can be imagined or

embodied by the first ready pen, or even able intellect. No one of all

the tumultuous band that directed affairs in Scotland has given us any

reason to suppose that he was capable of it. Its very contradictions,

those changes of mood and feeling which the most ignorant reader can

perceive, are quite beyond the mark of ordinary invention. Mr. Froude

has said that only Shakespeare or Mary Stewart could have written it--at

all events the writer, supposing it to be forged, must have been of

unquestionable imaginative genius. It is one of the most wonderful

compositions ever given to the world. We look on with awe while those

dark secrets of the heart are unfolded. The revelation is too

tremendous, too overwhelming, and far too true to nature, to call forth

mere horror and condemnation. It is a proof of the often-repeated

statement that could we but see into the heart of the greatest criminal

pity would mingle with our judgment. Nothing could be more criminal and

horrible than the acts therein anticipated, yet we think it would be

impossible for any unbiassed mind to read this letter for the first time

without an increase at least of interest in the writer, so transported

by her love, ready almost to brag of the falsehood and treachery into

which it leads her, till sick shame and horror of herself breathes over

her changing mood, and she feels that even he for whose love all is

undertaken must loathe her as she loathes herself. To imagine Buchanan,

an old man of the world, somewhat coarse, fond of a rough jest, little

used to women, and past the age of passion, as producing that tragical

and terrible revelation, is almost more than impossible, it is an insult

to the reader's intelligence. And accordingly the latest writers on this

subject have relinquished that accusation; they no longer charge the old

pedagogue with such an effort of genius; they confine themselves to

accusing him of ingratitude towards his benefactress, which is as much

as to say that a little personal favour, even when well earned, is to

compel a man to shut his eyes henceforward to the character and conduct

of the person who has conferred it, and that both patriotic feeling and

political policy are to be quenched by a pension, which is a strange

view.

There can be no doubt, however, that Buchanan made out the case against

the Queen with all the rhetorical force of which he was capable; that

the accusation was bitter, as of a man who had been personally deceived

and injured, as indeed it is quite possible that he may have felt

himself to be; and that there was no pity, no mercy, nor compunction

towards her, such as arose in many men's bosoms after a little time, and

have been rife ever since both in writers and readers. The _Detection_

is without ruth, and assumes the most criminal and degrading motives

throughout. Its intention clearly is to convince Scotland, England, and

the world of Mary's utter depravity, and the impossibility of any excuse

for her or argument in her favour. The strong and fiery indignation in

it is indeed lessened in effect, at least to us in these latter days, by

the over strength of the indictment; and the reader who turns from the

perusal of the Glasgow letter--which damns indeed yet rouses a world of

conflicting feelings, awe and terror and pity for the lost soul thus

tragically self-condemned--to the historical document in which the

charges against the Queen are authoritatively set forth, cannot fail to

be struck by the difference. It is far from being simple abhorrence with

which we regard the revelation of the one, but in the other there is no

light; the picture is inhuman and impossible in its utter blackness, the

guilt imputed to the Queen is systematic, unimpassioned, the mere

commonplace of an utterly depraved nature. The wild emotion and terrible

impulse in her becomes mere vulgar vice in her accuser's hands. In this

there is nothing wonderful, nothing out of the common course of nature,

which is prone to make every indictment more bitter than the facts that

prove it.

But it may well be believed that it was something of a fierce

consolation to the high-tempered and strong-speaking Scots, in the rush

of universal popular condemnation, to believe and assert that the Queen,

who had so disappointed and disenchanted all her well-wishers, had been

bad through and through, indecent and shameless. The inclination, almost

the wish, to think the worst of every fallen idol has not died out with

the generation which condemned Mary Stewart; and Buchanan was the

spokesman, the advocate of the other party, whose conduct could only be

justified by the establishment of her guilt. If she were not guilty,

they were traitors. If all the proof against her was but a mass of

distorted facts and false swearing, nothing in the way of punishment was

too bad for her unfaithful subjects. A mistake was impossible, the

struggle was one of life and death. The spokesman in such a tremendous

issue, the narrator and setter forth of the terrible question,

especially if he is a person whose trade it is to write, and who can be

accused of doing his work for hire, is always at a disadvantage. It can

never be proved to the vulgar mind that he has not formed his opinions

to order, that he does not give them out to the world according as they

may best benefit and satisfy his employers. His masters may be hated,

but he is both hated and despised. If it could be proved that Murray was

solely actuated by ambition and the hope of getting the throne for

himself, he would still be a belligerent with the honours of war due to

him; but the scribe, the hireling who is employed to state the whole

matter, has no position but that of a venal dependant ready to set forth

whatever is for his master's interests. Thus the historian of a party,

who makes money by his work, the literary advocate whose office it is to

make the strongest statement possible of his employer's case, is

subject--or at least was subject in more primitive times--to the worst

reproaches. His testimony was seldom taken as conscientious or true.

Buchanan's _Detection_ was peculiarly subject to this reproach. It was

written for the purpose of proving the case of the lords by demolishing

entirely that of the Queen--before England and the commissioners of

England first, seated in session to investigate the subject, and after

them before the world in general. The inquiry which was opened at York

in October 1568, six months after Mary's escape to England, was the most

like a trial of anything in which her history was discussed. She was

represented by commissioners, while Murray and several of his colleagues

were present in person, along with Buchanan and other secretaries or

minor commissioners. It was at this inquiry that the Casket Letters were

first produced under, we are bound to say, if we judge by the rules of a

period of settled law and order like our own, very suspicious

circumstances. Even the question of the language in which they were

written is a very difficult one. All through, indeed, this question is

difficult, though it is never formally discussed until that tragical

occasion. In what language did Mary and Knox hold their discussions?

Could it be always in French that this accomplished Queen wrote and

spoke? When she is reported to have said, as recorded in a previous

chapter, "That man gart me greet sore, and grat never tear," is this

expression, so distinctively and strongly Scots, a translation from some

more elegant murmur in another language? She who had so many tongues,

had she left out that in which she had been born, the language of her

childhood and of her country? This problem is only considered by the

historians when it is required to prove that a letter must be forged

because it is apparently first written in Scots. There is also a very

great point made of the difference between Scots and English, which

seems to have been very slight indeed, a difference of spelling more

than anything else, nothing that could confuse any but the most ignorant

reader. The following sentences from Buchanan's "_Admonition direct to

the Trew Lordis, maintaineris of justice_" will throw some light on the

latter question, the difference between the written speech of the two

different kingdoms, which one writer tells us would have made it easier

for Queen Elizabeth to read letters in French than Scots:--

"It may seme to zour lordshippis," says Buchanan, "yat I, melling

with heich materis of governing of comoun welthis do pass myne

estait, being of sa meane qualitie, or forgetting my dewtie geveing

counsal to ye wysest of yis realme. Not the les seeing the miserie

sa greit appeiring, and the calamitie sa neir approching, I thocht

it les fault to incur the cryme of surmounting my private estait

than the blame of neglecting the publict danger."

From this the reader will be able to judge what extraordinary difficulty

there was in the Scotch to an English reader of those days. The use of z

instead of y, of y instead of th, are matters very easily mastered; and

it is surely the utmost folly to suppose that Queen Elizabeth could have

found the slightest difficulty in deciphering this northern version of

the common tongue.

The document quoted above is a very powerful and no doubt also violent

assault upon the Hamiltons, especially called forth by the murder of the

Regent Murray, the slackness of the succeeding Government in the

punishment of his assassin, and the powerful reasons there were for

destroying--a measure which Buchanan thought imperative both for the

safety of the realm and the child-king--that powerful family, the head

of which was next in succession to the Scotch Crown, and had been

popularly believed to be ready for any crime to obtain it. Now that

there was nothing but the life of a child between the Hamiltons and this

elevation, Buchanan lifted up his testimony against the supineness which

left the race undisturbed to carry out its evil designs. Murray had been

murdered in the beginning of 1570, and the _Admonition_ was printed at

Stirling a few months later. In the same year Buchanan wrote that

curious tract called the _Chameleon_, a satirical attack upon

Lethington, which is not very brilliant either in language or

conception, and fails altogether in the incisive bitterness which

characterises most of Buchanan's other political papers. "It is at least

equal in vigour and elegance to that of most compositions in the ancient

Scottish language," says Buchanan's biographer, but few modern readers

will agree in this verdict. Buchanan's hand had not the lightness

necessary for such a performance. The guilt of Mary and the death of

Murray furnished him with more emphatic motives than the iniquities of

Maitland, and he was evidently stronger in assault and invective than in

the lighter methods of composition.

It might have been supposed that his hopes of preferment would have been

seriously injured by Murray's death. But it was after this event that he

was selected for the greatest office which Scotland could bestow upon a

scholar--the education of the young King. Buchanan's services were no

doubt well worthy of such a reward: at the same time it may be allowed

that a scholar so renowned, the first of contemporary poets according to

the judgment of his class, and the greatest of lettered Scotsmen beyond

all question, could not be passed over. During the intervening time he

had retained the appointment of Principal of St. Leonard's College, his

frequent absences being made possible by the fact that though he had

much to do with the government and regulation of the University of St.

Andrews, he was not actively employed in giving instruction. But after

this we float at once into a halcyon time. It was in the end of 1569 or

beginning of 1570 that he was appointed the governor of the King, and in

this capacity and amid peaceful surroundings more appropriate to his

character than the rage of politics, the old scholar becomes more

distinctly visible than it was possible he could be in the midst of

contention and under the shadow of greater men. He was about sixty-four

at the time he entered upon the active duties of the office. "A man of

notable endowments for his knowledge of Latin poesie--much honoured in

other countries, pleasant in conversation, rehearsing on all occasions

moralities short and instructive, whereof he had abundance, inventing

when he wanted," says Sir James Melville. _Sandford and Merton_ had not

been written for the advantage of schoolboys in Melville's days, yet the

picture is that of an antiquated Mr. Barlow never forgetting the art of

instruction. The particular anecdotes, however, told of Buchanan, do not

recall Mr. Barlow or his "moralities" at all.

[Illustration: STIRLING CASTLE]

The little King James, a precocious and clever child like all the

infantile monarchs of the house of Stewart, had been established at

Stirling, always a favourite residence of the Scotch Kings, where he

held his baby Court in peace while his mother pined in England, and the

Scotch lords struggled for the mastery, and succeeded each other as

Regents at home. The troubles of the world outside seem to have been

kept far from the surroundings of the boy, to whom both the kingdoms

looked as their heir, the child in whom the glories of his race came to

a climax, and the union of the warring kingdoms was at last secured.

Personally, he was by far the least distinguished of his name, but no

one as yet suspected this fact or thought of Buchanan's pupil as less

hopeful than any of the gallant Jameses who had preceded him. The little

Court at Stirling was presided over at this early period by the Lady

Mar, a dignified matron who was "wise and sharp and kept the king in

great awe," although at the same time very tender of the child and

respectful of his royal dignity. Almost all James's immediate

surroundings seem to have belonged to this powerful race. The master of

the household was a certain Laird of Drumwhasel, to whom no other name

is given, and who is described as ambitious and greedy, a man whose

"greatest care was to advance himself and his friends." Alexander

Erskine, another member of the household, calls forth something like

enthusiasm in the courtly narrative as "a gallant, well-nurtured

gentleman, loved and honoured by all men for his good qualities and

great discretion, no ways factious nor envious, a lover of all honest

men, desiring to see men of good conversation about the prince rather

than his own nearest friends if he found them not so meet." In addition

to this official household were the tutors charged with James's

education, two of them being members of the Erskine family, abbots of

Cambuskenneth and Dryburgh, though those titles were no doubt merely

fictitious, meaning only that the "temporalities," the endowments of the

extinct monasteries, were in their hands. The other and principal

masters of James were Sir Peter Young and Mr. George Buchanan. Young was

"gentle, loth to offend the king at any time, carrying himself warily as

a man who had a mind to his own weal by keeping of his majesty's

favour"--"but Mr. George," adds the historian, "was a Stoick philosopher

who looked not far before him." He "held the king in great awe," so that

James "even trembled" as he himself says elsewhere, "at his approach,"

and did not spare either rod or word in the interests of his pupil. Some

of the anecdotes of this severe impartiality are amusing enough. At one

time annoyed by the noise which the King and his playfellows were

making, Buchanan bade them be silent under certain penalties if the

offence were repeated, and provoked by a childish impertinence from

James, took up the little culprit and whipped him with exemplary

impartiality, notwithstanding that his companion, the little Master of

Mar, stood by, on whom vicarious chastisement might have been applied.

Lady Mar, rushing to the scene of action at the sound of "the wailing

which ensued," took the child from his master's hands and consoled him

in her motherly arms, asking Buchanan indignantly how he dared to touch

the Lord's anointed. The incident is very natural and amusing in its

homely simplicity; the child crying, the lady soothing him, the sardonic

old master in his furred nightgown and velvet cap, looking on unmoved,

bidding her kiss the place to make it well. The Master of Mar no doubt

would cry too for sympathy, and the old gentleman take up his big book

and move off to seek a quieter place for study. On another occasion,

when the little King tried to get a sparrow from his companion and

crushed the bird in the struggle, Buchanan rated him as himself a bird

out of a bloody nest. He was an old man and alone in the world,

indifferent to future favours from a king whose reign he would probably

not live to see, and treating him with impartial justice.

There was, however, no indifference to James's education in this austere

simplicity: indeed it would seem that Buchanan, like other preceptors of

monarchs, had some hope of forming an ideal prince out of the boy. A few

years after his appointment to his office, and when James was still too

young to profit by it, he began to write his famous treatise, in the

form of a dialogue, upon the laws of the kingdom, the duty respectively

of kings and subjects. The _De Jure Regni_, published when the King was

about twelve, was dedicated to him in a grave and dignified letter in

which Buchanan describes his work as an attempt to expound the

prerogatives of the Scottish Crown, "in which," he says, "I endeavoured

to explain from their very cradle, so to speak, the reciprocal rights

and privileges of kings and their subjects." He goes on to say that the

book was written in the midst of the public troubles with a view to

enlightening the disturbers of the commonwealth as to their duties: but

that peace beginning to be established he had sacrificed his argument

for the sake of public tranquillity. Now, however, that it may be useful

to the development of the King he brings it forth again. The direct

address to James is full of that curious self-deception or defective

insight which is so common among those who have the training of a pupil

of great importance in the world. The boy had grown beyond the age of

personal chastisement; he had reached that in which the precocious

facility of comprehension, which is so strongly fostered by the

circumstances of such a position as his, looks to the dazzled pedagogues

and attendants like genius, and there seems no prognostic too happy or

too brilliant for the new career in which at last there is about to be

fulfilled all that men have dreamed of a king.

"Many circumstances tend to convince me that my present exertions

will not prove fruitless, especially your age, yet uncorrupted by

perverse opinions; a disposition beyond your years, spontaneously

urging you to every noble pursuit; a facility in obeying not only

your preceptors, but all prudent monitors; a judgment and dexterity

in disquisition which prevent you from paying much regard to

authority, unless it be confirmed by solid argument. I likewise

perceive that by a kind of natural instinct, you so dislike

flattery, the nurse of tyranny, and the most grievous pest of a

legitimate monarchy, that you as heartily hate the courtly solecisms

and barbarisms as they are relished and affected by those who

consider themselves as the arbiters of every elegance, and who, by

way of seasoning their conversation, are perpetually sprinkling it

with majesties, lordships, excellencies, and, if possible, with

other expressions still more nauseous. Although the bounty of nature

and the instruction of your governors may at present secure you

against this error, yet am I compelled to entertain some slight

degree of suspicion lest evil communication, the alluring nurse of

the vices, should lend an unhappy impulse to your still tender mind,

especially as I am not ignorant with what facility the external

senses yield to seduction. I have therefore sent you this treatise,

not only as a monitor, but even as an importunate and sometimes

impudent dun, who in this turn of life may convoy you beyond the

rocks of adulation; and may not merely offer you advice, but confine

you to the path which you have entered, and if you should chance to

deviate may reprehend you and recall your steps. If you obey this

monitor you will ensure tranquillity to yourself and your family,

and will transmit your glory to the most distant posterity."

That James VI should be described as disliking flattery and despising

authority, if not enforced by solid argument, is strange to hear; and

that he should be so boldly called upon to consider a plea for national

freedom and a constitutional rule, as the chief guarantee of

tranquillity and honour, is still more remarkable. Certainly it was not

from Buchanan that he got those high pretensions of divine right, which

had never flourished in Scotland; although by a not uncommon paradox the

most faithful partisans of the family which was brought to ruin by these

pretensions were found in the northern kingdom. Very different were the

doctrines upon which Buchanan nourished the royal child. James

acknowledged afterwards not ungracefully the distinction of his

instructor in letters. "All the world," he says, "knows that my master

George Buchanan was a great master in that faculty." But his opinions in

politics found no favour in his pupil's eyes when James emerged from his

youthful subjection and began to show his native mettle. At twelve,

individuality in that respect would scarcely be developed, and a

reverence for his tutor's sharp tongue and ready hand would keep the

King from premature opposition.

While this work was going on in the comparative quiet of Stirling,

Scotland was lost in the turmoil of one of the most wild and terrible

portions of her history. It is indeed rather from the glimpse we have of

the little royal household in the foreground of all that strife and

bloodshed, the Lady Mar in her matronly dignity, Buchanan in his furred

gown among his books, and the clamour and laughter of the two boys

interrupting the quiet, that we can believe in any semblance of peace or

domestic life at all in the distracted country. The Regent Lennox, the

King's grandfather, was killed under the very rocks of the castle where

James learned his lessons. His young companion's father, the Earl of

Mar, was taken from the family at Stirling and raised to a brief and

agitated Regency, through all of which a civil war was raging. And till

from beyond the seas there came the still more horrible news of that

French massacre which convulsed the world, and made an end of Mary's

party, nothing was secure from one day to another in Scotland. It was in

the midst of that very tumult and endless miserable conflict, in which

Mary's followers had at last set up the doctrine of her irresponsibility

and divine right to retain her position as Queen whatever might be her

guilt as Mary Stewart--that the scholar set himself to compose his work

upon the rights of the kingdom and the duties of kings. His high temper,

his strong partisanship, his stern logic, would find an incitement and

inspiration in those specious arguments on the other side which were so

new to Scotland, and had been contradicted over and over again in her

troublous history, where no one was so certain to be brought to book for

his offences as the erring or unsuccessful monarch. It must be difficult

for a great classicist to be at the same time a believer in the divine

right of kings; and it was a new idea for the mediaeval Scot accustomed

to reverence the name, but to criticise in the sharpest practical way

the acts of his sovereign. And we may imagine that the old scholar, who

could not but hear from his window the shouts of the warfare between the

Queen's party and the King's, would have a grim satisfaction as he sat

high above them, protected more or less by the royal name, in forging at

his leisure those links of remorseless argument which, though they had

no effect upon the pupil to whom they were dedicated, had their share in

regulating that great rebellion which had so important an effect upon

the after-history of the two kingdoms.

During this period, however, Buchanan had other occupations besides his

tutorship and his literary work. He was made "director of the Chancery,"

whatever that may mean, and in 1570 was elevated to the post of Keeper

of the Privy Seal, in which capacity he served in various Parliaments:

and was also a member of the Privy Council. When the conspiracy arose

against the Regent Morton which ended in his temporary deprivation of

the regency, Buchanan seems to have taken part against him, though on

what argument we are not told: for it was Morton's power which had

brought about the re-establishment of peace and order to which he refers

in the dedication of his book. And it is a feasible conjecture that it

was by his crafty suggestion that the Regent's fictitious plaints of

being weary of his high office and desiring nothing more than that the

King's Majesty should take the government into his own hand, were

ingeniously twisted so as to give his dismissal the air of a gracious

consent to Morton's own wishes. An old man like Buchanan, well

acquainted with the wiles of logic and the pretexts of state, was more

likely to use an advantage in which there is a certain grim humour, and

to take the adversary in his own toils, than such an inexperienced

politician as young Mar, or any of the undistinguished nobles who

carried out that stratagem. Whether Buchanan supported his old pupil,

Mar, in his attempt to seize the governorship of the castle and the

King's person out of the hands of his uncle, or in what aspect he was

regarded when Morton returned to the head of affairs, we have no means

of knowing. Whatever his influence might be at the King's ear or amid

the secret meetings of the malcontents, neither as Lord Privy Seal nor

as King James's tutor did he come in public collision with any public

authority. His action, whenever he appears publicly, is perfectly

characteristic of his real position and faculties. He took part in a

commission for the establishment of a system of municipal law: he was

one of the Church's commissioners on two occasions in determining her

policy and discipline. When the reform of the Universities of Scotland,

so often taken up since then, and so slow to be accomplished, was

brought under the consideration of Parliament, Buchanan was one of the

chief of the commissioners appointed to consider it. He is reported to

have been the author of a scheme of reconstruction to be employed in the

University of St. Andrews; and it is interesting to find in this new

system that special attention was enjoined to be given to Greek, and

that the study of Hebrew was also recommended to the students. The

latter language, we believe, still remains an established part of the

studies of young men in preparation for the ministry in the Church of

Scotland. Buchanan desired that the Principal of his own College, St.

Leonards, should lecture on Plato. And he made a present of a number of

Greek books, still carefully preserved, to Glasgow University, though

why he should have chosen to send them there, instead of to his own

smaller and poorer University, we have nothing to show. It is thus

apparent that in his active public work Buchanan's chief attention was

given to his own proper subjects. There is no evidence that he did more

than was indispensable to his official character in matters more

exclusively political.

His old age thus passed, in a certain learned leisure which it is very

difficult to imagine as existing in so tumultuous a period and amid so

many violent changes and vicissitudes. He had many learned

correspondents throughout the world, almost all the great scholars of

the time being numbered among his friends; and the letters which he

received from all quarters implied a considerable amount of

letter-writing on his side. He sent copies of his books to his friends

as if he had been the most modern of novelists, and it is curious to

think of the big laborious volume of solemn Latin dramas, or that thin

but weighty tome, instinct with another and more living kind of

interest, which set forth the rights of nations--sent by some trusty

messenger, a young scholar finding in the packet entrusted to his charge

the best introduction to one of the lights of learning on the Continent,

or some adventurer making his way to a commission in the Scottish

Archers or other service of arms more profitable for a younger son than

the frays and feuds of Scotland. The learned doctors of the Sorbonne,

the scholars of Geneva, and the printers of Holland, replied on their

side not only with elaborate thanks and eulogies, but with responsive

presents, treatises or translations of their own, some of them dedicated

to the royal boy who was the pupil of their friend, and of whom he gave

so wonderful a description. "I have been guilty of trifling with a

sacred subject," wrote Berger with his volume of poems, "and I have

dedicated my trifles to a king." Another learned correspondent sends a

Plato which he has edited, one volume of which he had also inscribed to

James, begging that his friend would present it to his Majesty. They

would seem to have shared Buchanan's satisfaction in his princely pupil,

and it is chiefly by way of reflection, through these responses, that we

perceive what his opinion of the young King was, and how much proud

delight, expressed no doubt in the most classical language, he took in

the boy's aptitude and promise. The following letter, however, which is

not classical at all, but written in choice Scots and addressed to Queen

Elizabeth's envoy, Sir Thomas Randolph, gives a less dignified but very

graphic description of his own circumstances and occupations. It is

written from Stirling during Morton's Regency, when peace prevailed and

even prosperity had returned in some measure to the distracted kingdom.

"To Maister Randolph, Squiar, Maister of Postes to the Queen's Grace

of England.

"Maister, I haif rescevit diverse letters frome you, and yit I haif

answerit to nane of them--of the quhilk albeit I haif mony excuses

such as age, forgetfulness, business, and disease, yet I will use

nane as now, except my sweirness (reluctance) and your gentleness:

and gif ye think nane of them sufficient, content you with ane

confession of the falt without fear of punition to follow on my

onkindness. As for the present I am occupied in writyng of our

historie, being assured to content few, and to displease many

therethrow. As to the end of it if ye gett it not or (before) this

winter bepassit lippen (trust) not for it, no nane other writyngs

from me. The rest of my occupation is with the gout quhilk halds me

busy both day and night. And quhair ye say ye have not lang to lyif

I trust to God to go before you, albeit I be on foot, and ye ryd

_the post_: praying you also not to _dispost_ my hoste at Newark,

Jone of Kelsterne. This I pray you partly for his awyn sake quhame I

tho't ane gude fellow, and partly at request of such as I dare not

refuse. And thus I take my lief shortly at you now, and my lang lief

when God pleases, committing you to the protection of the Almighty.

At Stirling, xxv. day of August, 1577.--Yours to command with

service,

G. BUCHANAN."

The mild, aged jest about preceding his friend out of life though he

must go on foot and Randolph had the advantage of commanding the Post,

and his recommendation of the erring postmaster at Newark, who was a

good fellow, throw a pleasant light of kindly humour into this letter.

And we thus hear for the first time of the History, the greatest work of

his life, which he seems to have begun in the tranquillity of the

palace-castle, notwithstanding the hostile influence of gout and

years--hostile above all to so great a piece of work. He was now over

seventy, and the end of his career seemed near at hand, although he had

but recently taken in hand so great an enterprise. Buchanan's History is

not, more than other great histories which have succeeded it, an

absolutely impartial work; but it is, throughout all his own stirring

and momentous age, the record of a bystander with abundant means of

knowledge and a keen apprehension of all the controversies and struggles

of his time. If he may perhaps glorify too much the character of his

patron and friend the Regent Murray, and take the darkest view of Mary,

we can only say that he would have been more angel than man had he kept

himself absolutely without bias in that hot and still unexhausted

debate. And there was nothing angelical about the old scholar who had

taken a part in so many historical events, from the siege of Wark

Castle, where he was present as a boy, to the Conferences at York and

Westminster, which were matters of yesterday. The science of history has

so much developed since his time that it may almost be said to have made

a new beginning; and much that was considered authoritative and

convincing then has fallen into the limbo of uncertainty, when not

rejected altogether. The many differing motives and agencies which can

only be fully estimated when the period of discussion is past, have come

to occupy a far greater space in the mind of the historian than had been

dreamed of in Buchanan's days; and the careful examination of evidence

with which we are now familiar was unknown either in the study of the

writer or the courts of law during a time which has left endless

questions from both to be debated and re-debated by succeeding

generations. But yet Buchanan's History remains the most important and

dignified record of the national existence up to his time; and no one

would now venture to treat the story of ancient Scotland, the chronicles

of her kings, or even the still undecided questions of Mary Stewart's

life and reign, without the guidance more or less of this great

authority. It was a bold step to dedicate to King James a record in

which his mother's life was denounced and condemned with such unsparing

freedom; but the astonishing absence of sympathy or human understanding

shown in this was shared by the greater part of Buchanan's

contemporaries, who evidently felt the facts of the mother's guilt to be

too abundantly demonstrated and universally consented to, to demand any

delicacy of statement as addressed to her son. No one, we think, can

entertain any doubt of the historian's own strong conviction on this

subject. Among the many fables current about Buchanan, there was one

circumstantial and oft-repeated, of his repentance on his deathbed of

his judgment of the Queen; but this is entirely set at rest by the

affecting record which we shall quote farther on of a last visit paid to

him by certain of his friends who had taken fright at the boldness of

his statements, and feared that the King, now grown up and developing

his own individual sentiments, might stop the issue of the book when he

saw these uncompromising records.

We must add one pretty story of Buchanan's kindness to his brethren in

scholarship and literature which shows the sharp and cautious scholar in

a very pleasant light. A certain Thomas Jack, a schoolmaster in Glasgow,

had composed in Latin verse a little book upon the ancient poets, called

the _Onomasticon Poeticum_, and encouraged by the friendship already, as

he says, shown to him by Buchanan, carried the book to him for revision.

"I found him in the royal palace of Stirling, diligently engaged in

writing his History of Scotland. He was so far from being displeased

by the interruption that he cheerfully took my work from my hands,

and after reading two or three pages of it, collected together his

own papers which were scattered on the table, and said, 'I will

desist from my work till I have done what you wish.' This promise he

accurately fulfilled; and within a few days gave me a paper written

with his own hand, and containing such corrections as he thought

necessary."

One can imagine the old scholar seated with his documents before him in

the light of a broad window, perhaps arrived at some knotty point which

wanted consideration, and turning from the crabbed papers, which would

not fit themselves in, with that delight in a lawful interruption and

temptation to idleness which only hard-working students know. Much has

been said about the misery of such interruptions to the absorbed writer,

but no one has pointed out the occasional relief and comfort which they

bring. Buchanan must have hailed this occasion of evading for a moment

his legitimate work with all the pleasure of an old critic and

connoisseur suddenly appealed to with such a congenial demand. Even in

our ashes live their wonted fires, and where is the scholar who does not

turn with delight from his history or his sermon to criticise a copy of

verses, to _savourer_ a fine latinism or dig his pen through a false

quantity as if he were cutting down an enemy? Thomas Jack has departed

into oblivion along with his _Onomasticon_: but this record of the

friendly reception he and his book met with affords a delightful gleam

of light upon the historian's waning days.

It is more remarkable when we find another witness describing our

somewhat irascible and sharp philosopher as growing young again in the

boys who surrounded him, and adapting his mind to all ages and classes

of men. Probably by the time he came to be the King's preceptor Buchanan

had ceased to be so compliant, or very probably conceived it

appropriate, on principle, to be less indulgent to a pupil whose danger

it would be to have too many flatteries and caresses.

We have no very clear record when it was that the tutelage of James was

supposed to be over, or if Buchanan was ever formally freed from his

office. Informally the King would have seemed to be more or less his own

master at the end of Morton's Regency, when, though subject to "raids"

like that of Gowrie and the contending influence of one party after

another, there was no longer any Regent thought of, and the business of

the country was conducted formally in the King's name. It would seem,

however, from the dedication of the History, that Buchanan had ceased

for some time before its publication to take an active part in James's

education. He speaks in this of "the incurable illness" which made him

incapable of "discharging the office entrusted to me of cultivating the

genius" of the young King; and presents the book as making up in some

degree for that personal failure. The History ends with the death of the

Regent Lennox, he who was killed in Stirling almost under the

historian's eyes, and when Scotland was still distracted between two

parties, and in a state of civil warfare. It has been made a subject of

reproach to Buchanan that he stopped his chronicle before the beginning

of the Regency of Morton, because of his personal hatred to that brave

and able personage--a singular charge, seeing that Buchanan lived only a

few months after the last Regent of Scotland; and he has expressly

mentioned in one of his dedications the increased tranquillity which was

the result of Morton's government.

It is in Edinburgh we find the old man of letters in the last scene of

his long and laborious life. In September 1581 he was visited by three

gentlemen from St. Andrews, one of whom gives us the most lifelike and

interesting account of this last interview. It would have been still

more interesting had they afforded some indication where they found him,

whether he had some pleasant room granted to him in Holyrood, after so

many years with the King, a suitable retreat for his old age; or if he

had retired to some private lodging in the Canongate to end his days.

His visitors make no mention of such unimportant circumstances, but they

leave us a most touching and faithful picture of the end of his life.

These visitors were the famous Andrew Melville, Principal of the New

College at St. Andrews, a scholar almost as distinguished as himself,

who had at an earlier period been Buchanan's pupil, and who had acquired

his great knowledge in the same way, in the famous schools of the

continent; James Melville, his nephew, minister of Kilrenny on the

shores of Fife; and Thomas Buchanan, the cousin of the dying historian.

James Melville relates this last visit as follows:--

"That September in time of vacans, my uncle Mr. Andrew, Mr. Thomas

Buchanan and I, hearing that Mr. George Buchanan was weak, and his

Historie under the press, past over to Edinbruck annes errand

(expressly) to visit him and see the work. When we came to his

chalmer we found him sitting in his chair, teaching his young man

that servit him in his chalmer, to spell a, b, ab, and e, b, eb,

etc. Efter salutation Mr. Andro says, 'I see, sir, ye are not

idle.'--'Better this,' quoth he, 'nor stealing sheep--or sitting

idle which is as ill.' Thereafter he shew us the Epistle Dedicatorie

to the King, the which when Mr. Andro had read he told him that it

was obscure in some places, and wanted certain words to perfeyt the

sentence. Sayes he, 'I may do na mair for thinking on another

matter.'--'What is that?' sayes Mr. Andro. 'To die,' quoth he; 'but

I leave that and manie more things for you to help.'

"We went from him to the printer's workhouse, whom we found at the

end of the 17 book of his Cornicle at a place which we thought verie

hard for the tyme, which might be an occasion for staying the haill

work, anent the burial of Davie. Therefore staying the printer from

proceeding, we came to Mr. George again, and fand him bedfast by his

custom, and asking him how he did, 'Ever going the way of weilfare,'

says he. Mr. Thomas, his cousin, shawes him of the hardness of that

part of his Storie, that the King would be offendit with it, and it

might stay all the work. 'Tell me, man,' says he, 'gif I have told

the truth?'--'Yes,' says Mr. Thomas, 'Sir, I think so.'--'I will

bide his feud and all his kin's then;' quoth he. 'Pray, pray to God

for me, and let Him direct all.' So by the printing of his Cornicle

was endit, that maist learned, wyse, and godly man endit this mortal

life."

He was a pedagogue, perhaps something of a pedant, a hot partisan, a

special pleader; but few lives can show a more dignified and noble end.

If it was the truth he had written this old man cared for nothing else,

not even for that fame which is the last infirmity of noble minds. The

King might keep back the great work of his life, but he could not

silence the lips in which no fear of man was. Whatever might happen

afterwards, Buchanan's record was clear; to have told the truth was all

with which he had anything to do.

There is a touch of what for want of a better word we must call cynicism

in the humorous indifference with which the old philosopher is said to

have discussed his own burial. Finding, as the story goes, that there

was not money enough in the house for the last expenses, he ordered what

there was to be given to the poor, declaring that he was not concerned

as to what was to become of his remains. If they did not choose to bury

him they might let him lie, he said in grim jest. He was, however,

reverently buried by the authorities of Edinburgh, in the historical

churchyard of the Greyfriars, attended by "a great company of the

faithful," though no stone seems ever to have been placed to indicate

the spot where he was laid. Thus in some unknown corner he rests, like

so many other illustrious persons--a man who never rested in his life,

and carried down his labours to the very verge of the grave. It is a

curious satire upon human justice that his name should have been kept

green in Scotland by the rough jests of an imaginary Geordie Buchanan,

commonly supposed to have been the King's fool, as extraordinary a

travesty as it is possible to conceive. It is almost as strange a twist

of all the facts and meaning of life that the only money of which he

could be supposed to be possessed at his death should have been one

hundred pounds (Scots, no doubt), _arrears_ of the pension due to him

from the Abbey of Crossraguel, given by Queen Mary to that learned pupil

of the Sorbonne and lover of Lutetia with whom she read Latin at

Holyrood in the early days before trouble came.

[Illustration: GREYFRIARS CHURCHYARD]

PART IV

THE MODERN CITY

CHAPTER I

A BURGHER POET

After the extraordinary climax of dramatic interest which brought the

history of Edinburgh and of Scotland to the knowledge of the whole

world, and which has continued ever since to form one of the most

exciting chapters in general history, it was inevitable that when that

fated Court dispersed, and the lady who was its charm and head

disappeared also under the tragic waves which had been rising to engulf

her, there should fall a sudden blank into the record, a chill of

dulness and tedium, the charm departed and the story done. In fact, it

was not at all so, and the metropolis of Scotland continued to seethe

with contending elements, and to witness a continued struggle,

emphasised by many a martyrdom and deed of blood, and many a desperate

battle both hand to hand and head to head in the streets and in the

council chambers, all with more or less the religious question involved,

and all helping to work out the final settlement. When that final

settlement came after all the tumults and blood it had cost, it is

scarcely possible not to feel the downfall from those historical

commotions to the dead level of a certain humdrum good attained, which

was by no means the perfect state hoped for, yet which permitted peace

and moderate comfort and the growth of national wellbeing. The little

homely church towers of the Revolution, as they are to be seen, for

instance, along the coast of Fife, are not more unlike the Gothic spires

and pinnacles of the older ages, than was the limited rustical provision

of the Kirk, its restricted standing and lowered pretensions, unlike the

ideal of Knox, the theocracy of the Congregation and the Covenant.

Denuded not only of the wealth of the old communion, but of those

beautiful dwelling-places which the passion of the mob destroyed and

which the policy of the Reformers did not do too much to

preserve--deprived of the interest of that long struggle during which

each contending presbyter had something of the halo of possible

martyrdom about his head--the Church of the Revolution Settlement lost

in her established safety, if not as much as she gained, yet something

which it was not well to lose. And the kingdom in general dropped in

something like the same way into a sort of prose of existence, with most

of the picturesque and dramatic elements gone. Romance died out along

with the actual or possible tragedies of public life, and Humour came

in, in the development most opposed to romance, a humour full of mockery

and jest, less tender than keen-sighted, picking out every false

pretence with a sharp gibe and roar of laughter often rude enough, not

much considerate of other people's feelings. Perhaps there was something

in the sudden cessation of the tragic character which had always

hitherto distinguished her history, which produced in Scotland this

reign of rough wit and somewhat cynical, satirical, audacious mirth, and

which in its turn helped the iconoclasts of the previous age, and

originated that curious hatred of show, ceremony, and demonstration,

which has become part of the Scottish character. The scathing

sarcasm--unanswerable, yet false as well as true--which scorned the

"little Saint Geilie," the sacred image, as a mere "painted bradd," came

down to every detail of life; the rough jokes of the Parliament House at

every trope as well as at every pretence of superior virtue; the grim

disdain of the burgher for every rite; the rude criticism of the fields,

which checked even family tendernesses and caresses as shows and

pretences of a feeling which ought to be beyond the need of

demonstration, were all connected one with another. Nowhere has love

been more strong or devotion more absolute; but nowhere else, perhaps,

has sentiment been so restrained, or the keen gleam of a neighbour's eye

seeing through the possible too-much, held so strictly in check all

exhibitions of feeling. Jeanie Deans, that impersonation of national

character, would no more have greeted her delivered sister with a

transport of kisses and rapture than she would have borne false

testimony to save her. There is no evidence that this extreme

self-restraint existed from the beginning of the national history, but

rather everything to show that to pageants and fine sights, to dress and

decoration, the Scots were as much addicted as their neighbours. But the

natural pleasure in all such exhibitions would seem to have received a

shock, with which the swift and summary overthrow of Mary's empire of

beauty and gaiety, like the moral of a fable, had as much to do as the

scornful destruction of religious image and altar. The succeeding

generations indemnified themselves with a laugh and a gibe for the loss

of that fair surface both of Church and Court: and the nation has never

given up the keen criticism of every sham and seeming which exaggerated

the absolutism of its natural character, and along with the destruction

of false sentiment imposed a proud restraint and restriction upon much

also that was true.

[Illustration: EDINBURGH: GENERAL VIEW]

[Illustration: ALLAN RAMSAY'S SHOP]

To come down from the age when Mary still reigned in Holyrood and Knox

in St. Giles's--and Edinburgh saw every phase of passion and tragedy,

wild love, hatred, revenge, and despair, with scarcely less impassioned

devotion, zeal, and fury of Reformation, and all the clang of opposed

factions, feuds, and frays in her streets--to the age when the

Parliament House and its law courts were the centre of Edinburgh, when

Holyrood was the debtors' sanctuary, and St. Giles's a cluster of parish

churches, even its distinctive name no longer used: and when the

citizens clustered about the Cross of afternoons no longer to see the

heralds in their tabards and hear the royal proclamations, but to tell

and spread the news from London and discuss the wars in the Low

Countries, and many a witty scandal, gibes from the Bench and repartees

from the Bar, the humours of the old lords and ladies in their "Lodging"

in the Canongate, and the witticisms of the favourite changehouse--is as

great a leap as if a whole world came between. The Court at St. Germains

retained the devotion of many, but Anne Stewart was on the throne, and

rebellion was not thought of, while everything was still full of hope

for the old dynasty, so that Edinburgh was at full leisure to talk and

jeer and gossip and make encounter of wits, with nothing more exciting

in hand. In this tranquil period, his apprenticeship being finished, a

certain young man from the west, by the name of Allan Ramsay, opened a

shop in the High Street "opposite Niddry's Wynd" as a

"weegmaker"--perhaps, if truth were known, a barber's shop, in all ages

known as the centre of gossip wherever it appears. It is odd, by the

way, that a place so entirely dedicated to the service of the male

portion of the population, and where women have no place, should have

this general reputation; but so it has always been. He had spent his

early years as a shepherd on Crawford Moor in the Upper Ward of

Clydesdale, and no doubt had there learned every song that floated about

the country-side. "Honest Allan" was in every respect a model of the

well-doing and prosperous Edinburgh shopkeeper of his time--a character

not too entirely engrossed by business, always ready for a frolic, a

song, a decorous bout of drinking, and known in all the haunts of the

cheerful townsmen: tolerant in morals yet always respectable, fond of

gossip, fond of fun, and if not fond of money yet judiciously disposed

to gain as much as he could make, or as his apprentices and careful wife

could make for him: and gradually progressing from a smaller to a larger

shop, from a less to a more "genteel" business, and finally to a

comfortable retirement.

In such a life there was plenty of room for enjoyment, for relaxation,

and no want of leisure to tell a good story or compose a string of

couplets where that gift existed, even when most busy. We may imagine

that he did not sit much at his block, but rather in the front of the

shop amusing his customers, while their periwigs were curled or fitted,

with Edinburgh gossip and wit in the familiarity of common citizenship,

or with anecdotes which enlightened the country gentlemen, especially

those from the west, the last _bon mot_ of the Parliament House, or the

Lord Advocate's latest deliverance. And his clubs were as numerous as

those of a young man of fashion. The "Easy Club" was composed of "young

anti-unionists," which indicates the politics which the wigmaker mildly

held in cheerful subjection to the powers that were. No doubt he would

have gone to the death (in verse) for the privileges of Edinburgh: but

the anti-unionism or sentimental Jacobitism of his class was not of a

kind to trouble any Government. And except the question of the Union,

which was settled early in his career, politics do not seem to have been

of an exciting character in Edinburgh. Local matters, always the most

interesting of any to the inhabitants of a town not great enough to be

cosmopolitan but full of distinct and striking individuality, furnished

the poetical wigmaker with his first themes. It would seem that he only

learned to rhyme from the necessity of taking his part in the high jinks

of the club; at least all his early productions were intended for its

diversion. An "Elegy on Maggie Johnstone," mistress of a convenient

"public" at Morningside, then described as "a mile and a half west from

Edinburgh," a suburb on "the south side," though now a part of the

town--which would lie in the way of the members when they took their

walks abroad, and no doubt formed the end of many a Sabbath day's

ramble--was almost the first of his known productions; and we may well

believe that the jovial shopkeepers were delighted with the sensation of

possessing a poet of their own, and held many a discussion upon the new

verses--brimful of local allusions and circumstances which everybody

knew--over their ale as they rested in the village changehouse, or among

the fumes of their punch in their evening assemblies. Verses warm from

the poet's brain have a certain intoxicating quality akin to the toddy,

and no doubt the citizens slapped their thighs and snapped their fingers

with delight when some well-known name appeared, the incidents of some

story they knew by heart, or the features of some familiar character.

The satisfaction of finding in what they would call poetry a host of

local allusions about which there was no ambiguity, which they

understood like their ABC, would rouse the first hearers to noisy

enthusiasm. And thus encouraged, the cheerful bard (as he was called in

those days) went on till his fame penetrated beyond the club. Another

elegy of a more serious description was so highly thought of that it was

printed and given to the world by the club itself. That world meant

Edinburgh, its many tradesmen, the crowded inhabitants of all the lofty

"lands" about that centre of busy social life where the Cross still

stood, and the old Tolbooth gloomed over the street, cut in two by its

big bulk and the fabric of the Luckenbooths, a sort of island of masonry

which divided what is now the broad and airy High Street opposite St.

Giles's into two narrow straits. The writers and the advocates, the

professors and the clergy, Councillor Pleydell and his kind, were not

the first to discover that Ramsay the wigmaker had something in him more

than the other rough wits of the shops and markets. And by and by the

goodwives in their high lodgings, floor over floor, ever glad of

something new, learnt to send one of the bairns with a penny to the

wigmaker's shop in the afternoon to see if Allan Ramsay had printed a

new poem: and received with rapture the damp broadsheet brought in fresh

from the press, with a fable or a song in "gude braid Scots," or a witty

letter to some answering rhymester full of local names and things. There

was no evening paper in those days, and had there been it was very

unlikely it would have penetrated into all the common stairs and crowded

tenements. But Allan's songs, of which Jean or Peggy would "ken the

tune," and the stories that would delight the bairns, were better worth

the penny than news from distant London, which was altogether foreign

and unknown to that humble audience.

This no doubt was the sort of fame and widespread popular appreciation

which made the statesman of that day--was it Fletcher of Saltoun or

Duncan Forbes the great Lord President?--bid who would make the laws so

long as he might make the songs of the people. He had in all likelihood

learnt Allan's widely flying, largely read verses, which every _gamin_

of the streets knew by heart, in his childhood. And though they might

not be in general of a very ennobling quality, there are glimpses of a

higher poetry to come in some of these productions, and a great deal of

cheerful self-assertive content and local patriotism, as well as of

rough fun and jest. If it were not for the very unnecessary introduction

of Apollo as the god to whom "the bard" addresses his wishes, there

would be something not unworthy of Burns in the following lines. The

poet has of course introduced first, as a needful contrast, "the master

o' a guid estate that can ilk thing afford," and who is much "dawted

(petted) by the gods"--

"For me, I can be weel content

To eat my bannock on the bent,

And kitchen't wi' fresh air;

O' lang-kail I can make a feast

And cantily haud up my crest,

And laugh at dishes rare.

Nought frae Apollo I demand,

But through a lengthened life,

My outer fabric firm may stand,

And saul clear without strife.

May he then, but gi'e then,

Those blessings for my share;

I'll fairly, and squarely,

Quit a', and seek nae mair."

It was no doubt after he had achieved this reputation of the streets--a

thing more difficult than greater fame--that his imagination developed

in more continuous and refined effort. Whether he himself printed his

penny broadsheet as well as sold it we are not informed, but as he began

after a while to combine bookselling with wigmaking we may be allowed to

imagine that the press which produced these flying leaves was either in

or near his shop. It is difficult to realise the swarming of life and

inhabitation within the high houses of the old town in an age when

comfort was little understood: and even the concentration within so

small a space, of business, work, interest, idleness, and pleasure, is

hard to comprehend by people who have been used to appropriate a

separate centre to each of the great occupations or exercises of

mankind. When London was comparatively a small town it had still its

professional distinctions--the Court, the Temple, the City, the place

where law was administered and where money was made, where society had

its abode and poverty found a shelter. But in old Edinburgh all were

piled one on the top of another--the Parliament House within sight of

the shops, the great official and the poor artificer under the same

roof: and round that historical spot over which St. Giles's crown rose

like the standard of the city, the whole community crowded, stalls and

booths of every kind encumbering the street, while special pleaders and

learned judges picked their steps in their dainty buckled shoes through

the mud and refuse of the most crowded noisy market-place, and all the

great personages of Edinburgh paced the "plainstanes" close by at

certain hours, unheeding either smell or garbage or the resounding cries

of the street.

[Illustration: CROWN OF ST. GILES'S]

In such a crowded centre the sheets that were being read so eagerly,

laughed over by the very cadgers at their booths, conned by the women at

the stairheads, lying on every counter, where Allan's new verses would

be pulled to pieces by brother wits who had known him to do better, or

heard a livelier witticism from his lips no farther gone than yestreen,

must very soon have come to the notice of the westland lads at the

college, and from them to the learned professors, and still more

directly to the lively groups that went and came to the Parliament

House. Already the wigmaker's shop had thriven and prospered; the little

man, short and fat and jovial, who had begun to lay out books in his

window under the shadow of the curled and powdered periwigs, found the

results of his double traffic more satisfactory than poets use. He

boasts in one of his rhymed addresses that he thatches the outside and

lines the inside of many a douce citizen, "and baithways gathers in the

cash." He adds--

"And fain would prove to ilka Scot,

That poortith's no the poet's lot."

It must have been altogether an odd little establishment--the wigs set

out upon their blocks, perhaps, who knows, the barber's humbler craft

being plied behind backs; the books multiplying daily on shelves and in

windows, and the ragged boys with their pennies waiting to see if there

was a new piece by Allan Ramsay; while perhaps in the corner, where lay

the lists of the new circulating library--the first in Scotland--Miss

Lydia Languish with her maid, or my lady's gentlewoman from some fine

house in the Canongate, had come in to ask for the last new novel from

London, the Scotch capital having not yet begun to produce that article

for itself.

One may be sure that Allan, rotund and smiling, was always ready for a

crack with the ladies, and to recommend the brand new _Pamela_, the

support of virtue, or some contemporary work of lesser genius. Though

the general costume was like that worn in the other parts of the island,

perhaps a little behind London fashions, the fair visitors would still

be veiled with the plaid, the fine woven screen of varied tartan which

covered the head like a hood, and could on occasion conceal the face

more effectually than Spanish lace or Indian muslin--a singular

peculiarity not ancient and scarcely to be called national, since the

tartan came from the still-despised Highlands, and these were Lowland

ladies who wore the plaid. This fashion would seem to have begun to be

shaken by Ramsay's time, for he pleads its cause with all the fervour of

a poetical advocate. There is something grotesque in the arguments, and

still more grotesque in the names by which he distinguishes the wearers

of the plaid.

"Light as the pinions of the airy fry

Of larks and linnets who traverse the sky,

Is the Tartana, spun so very fine

Its weight can never make the fair repine;

Nor does it move beyond its proper sphere,

But lets the gown in all its shape appear;

Nor is the straightness of her waist denied

To be by every ravished eye surveyed;

For this the hoop may stand at largest bend,

It comes not nigh, nor can its weight offend.

* * * * *

"If shining red Campbella's cheeks adorn,

Our fancies straight conceive the blushing morn,

Beneath whose dawn the sun of beauty lies,

Nor need we light but from Campbella's eyes.

If lined with green Stuarta's plaid we view,

Or thine, Ramseia, edged around with blue,

One shews the spring when nature is most kind,

The other heaven whose spangles lift the mind."

The description of the manner in which this engaging garment is worn has

all the more reason to be quoted that it was not only a new piece by

Allan Ramsay, but affords a glimpse of the feminine figures that were to

be seen in the High Street of Edinburgh going to kirk and market in the

beginning of the eighteenth century. There is, too, a pleasant touch of

individuality in the musical street cry that wakes the morn.

"From when the cock proclaims the rising day,

And milkmaids sing around _sweet curds and whey_,

Till grey-eyed twilight, harbinger of night,

Pursues o'er silver mountains sinking light,

I can unwearied from my casements view

The Plaid, with something still about it new.

How are we pleased when, with a handsome air,

We see Hepburna walk with easy care!

One arm half circles round her slender waist,

The other like an ivory pillar placed,

To hold her plaid around her modest face,

Which saves her blushes with the gayest grace;

If in white kids her slender fingers move,

Or, unconfined, jet through the sable glove.

"With what a pretty action Keitha holds

Her plaid, and varies oft its airy folds!

How does that naked space the spirits move,

Between the ruffled lawn and envious glove!

We by the sample, though no more be seen,

Imagine all that's fair within the screen.

"Thus belles in plaids veil and display their charms,

The love-sick youth thus bright Humea warms,

And with her graceful mien her rivals all alarms."