Chapter 6 BIOGRAPHICAL FACTS

Earlier and Continental

Buchanan was born early in February 1506, at Moss or Mid-Leowen, on the Blane Water, about two miles south-east of Killearn in Stirlingshire, of a 'family ancient rather than opulent,' as he tells us in his Autobiography, so that he was delivered from the peasant or upstart consciousness which, except in the priesthood, would, in those feudal times, have handicapped him heavily in the race of life. His real and Scoto-Irish clan name was Macauslan, but the Macauslan having acquired the lands of Buchanan in the Lennox, took the name of his property, and became Buchanan of that Ilk; and thus it came to pass that our George ranked as a 'cadet of Buchanan,' as Hannay was proud and particular to specify. Ancient lineage, however, is no insurance against misfortune, and the Buchanans of Moss, never rich, sank into deep poverty. The father died in George's youth, and the grandfather who survived him was a waster and became a bankrupt, and Agnes Heriot, the mother, was left to struggle with the upbringing of five sons and three daughters-a task however, which she successfully accomplished, like the heroine she was, as her most distinguished son gratefully commemorates. Having never known wealth or luxury, perhaps it was easier for Buchanan to reconcile himself to their opposites in after years. In the Lennox they talked Gaelic, and Buchanan picked up that speech to begin with. He would also learn some Scotch or Northern English from his mother, who came from Haddingtonshire, and in addition she was careful to have him sent to the schools in the neighbourhood, where he could learn the elements of Latin.

For the old Church had not entirely neglected popular education, as has been shown, in a very interesting way, in Grant's Burgh Schools of Scotland, and as, indeed, appears on the face of the Reformers' First Book of Discipline itself (1560). Most of the burghs maintained schools, both secondary and elementary, so that the barons and freeholders who were ordered by the celebrated Act of James IV. (1494) to keep their heirs at school until they had learned 'perfyt Latyn'-then the international language of the educated and of diplomacy-had abundant opportunity of doing so had they chosen, although unfortunately they too seldom chose; so that the burgh schools were largely recruiting-grounds for the priesthood. There were also elementary Church schools, in many cases taught by women, and private adventure schools; and in these a considerable number of the children of the poor were taught at least to read. Accordingly, when it is said that Knox and the Reformers established the Scottish Parish School system, a little discrimination must be exercised. They did not invent popular education-they found it; but they did invent, on paper, in the First Book of Discipline, the idea of bringing education to the people's doors, by securing that there should be a school wherever there was a 'kirk'-that is, practically in every parish; so that 'the youth-head and tender children shall be nourished and brought up in vertue, in presence of their friends, by whose good attendance many inconveniences may be avoyded in which the youth commonly fall, either by over much libertie which they have in strange and unknowne places, while they cannot rule themselves; or else for lack of good attendance, and of such necessaries as their tender age requires.'

So far the Book of Discipline, at once recognising an existing educational system, and suggesting, for reason given, the vital improvement of its national application! The whole scheme, indeed, is admirable, including as it does compulsion, the picking out and, in the case of the poor, supporting the class of youth suited for the higher kinds of service to society, while the others not so gifted 'must be set to some handie craft, or to some other profitable exercise'-that is, technical education, or some other form of practical training. I have said 'on paper,' but not by way of sneer, and ought to add in passing, that it was not the fault of Knox and his associates that it remained to a great extent merely 'on paper,' instead of being immediately and effectually established. It was the fault and the disgrace of a different type of men. Knox, as I have already said, was a politician, and made dexterous use of the 'Lords of the Congregation' to secure the triumph of Protestantism. But these 'Lords of the Congregation' were politicians also, and made an equally dexterous use of Knox to fill their own pockets with Church spoil-I except a few, who were really noble men. They gave little for parish churches, and nothing that I ever heard of for parish schools. The whole thing broke poor Knox's heart. It did not ruffle Buchanan, although he was probably the greatest educational enthusiast in Europe at the moment. But he was really a greater intelligence and a calmer master of himself than Knox, and probably knew that any one who expects to find more than twenty-five per cent.-if so much-of the race as existing at any given moment worthy of intellectual or moral respect, must either have had little experience of life, or possess a very low standard of human excellence.

Not till 1696 was the plan of the Book of Discipline adumbrated in legislation, and the successors of the 'Lords of the Congregation' bound by law to provide a school-house and a salaried teacher in every parish. But during the whole of the intervening century and a third, the Presbyterian clergy never ceased in their efforts, and often their sacrifices, for popular education, while at the same time fighting a steady battle for liberty against as mean and cruel a crusade of Absolutist Monarchy and Ecclesiastical Tyranny as ever was preached by a ridiculous and pedant Peter against a self-respecting people. For myself, I fail to find much of the theology of the Covenanters credible-although I must say I should like if we could hear Knox and Melville, or even Cameron and Cargill, on the existing state of things. I think we should get some different guidance from what we are receiving from those blind leaders of the blind who shiveringly and stammeringly attempt to fill their places. For it is almost impossible to appraise too highly the service done by the Covenanters for the cause of liberty and popular education; and although they had their very obvious faults, one is always sorry to think that the aristocratic and Episcopalian prejudices of Scott should have led him to hold them up to ridicule, while glad that a higher and juster view was taken by a greater Scotsman even than Scott, when, in answer to a contemptuous critic of the men of the Covenant, Burns turned on him with the withering impromptu:-

'The Solemn League and Covenant

Cost Scotland blood-cost Scotland tears-

But it sealed Freedom's sacred cause-

If thou'rt a slave, indulge thy sneers.'[5]

We go back to young George Buchanan (1517-19) at the Catholic local grammar-school of Killearn or Dumbarton, or wherever else in the neighbourhood secondary education was to be had. The boy had shown such aptitude that his uncle, James Heriot, who is said to have been Justiciar of Lothian, sent him to the University of Paris, then, though not quite so much as at an earlier date, enjoying the reputation of the most notable of any seat of learning in existence. Instead of being required to pass through the preparatory school, he at once began his studies in the Arts faculty (1520, age fourteen), his Scottish acquirements having apparently been sufficient to pass him through whatever entrance examination was imperative. Here he spent about two years, working mainly at Latin versification, which, as his reputation for Latin poetry was to be the making of him in after years, was perhaps the best thing he could do, especially as he liked it. At this point, as evil fate would have it, his uncle died, and he himself fell ill. But as he was penniless, he had to struggle home, illness and all, as best he could, and was not able to move about again for a year or thereabouts (1523). And then it turned out that a very singular purpose had entered the mind of the ill or convalescent student of seventeen.

[Here ends Dr. Wallace's MS.]

That purpose was to enlist as a volunteer in an army for the invasion of England, to be led by the Regent Albany, who had supposed wrongs of his own as well as of the borders to avenge against that old neighbour and untiring enemy. That army, consisting of French auxiliaries and Scottish recruits, marched to Melrose and then partly crossed the Tweed by a wooden bridge, then, holding Flodden in memory, intimated a mutinous resolution not to cross the border, then marched down the left bank of the river, and for three days besieged Wark Castle to little effect, then made a sudden night-march to Lauder in a snowstorm, 'which told heavily on man and beast,' and reduced Buchanan to very bad health for the rest of the winter. Buchanan, when he came to write his own life in his old age, had come to believe that he joined this abortive expedition to learn the art of war, which, without intentions more far-seeing than those of a lad of eighteen, he certainly did, just as Gibbon was educated to understand the evolution of the phalanx and the legions, by what he saw, in his two and a half years' captaincy of the Hampshire Militia, of the evolutions of a modern battalion. In the spring of 1525 Buchanan appeared as a 'pauper student' at the University of St. Andrews, doubtless specially well qualified both as a student and as a 'pauper'-which epithet 'pauper,' however, meant probably nothing more opprobrious than a youth who required board and education free, like many a score of St. Andrews students, from poet Buchanan to poet Fergusson, who about two and a half centuries later sat at the bursar's free table and said grace over the too plentiful college rabbits that were last century procured from the links that now swarm only with golfers. He was sent there, he tells in his Autobiography, to 'sit at the feet of John Major,' the celebrated logician of that age; but he did not long sit at his feet as pupil before he felt in a position to criticise his master as a teacher of sophistry rather than logic. Next summer, having taken the St. Andrews B.A. degree, he followed or accompanied Major to Paris, and there passed through two years' adversity under pressure of poverty and the suspicion of not being an orthodox Papist. Fortune relaxed her frown, and he was admitted to the College of Ste. Barbe, in which he was Professor of Grammar for three years. Meanwhile Gilbert Kennedy, the young Earl of Cassilis, one of the earliest of Scottish hero-worshippers, had the insight to appreciate his learning and genius, and the devotion to adhere to him as friend, pupil, and protector for five years. In 1533, the tutor dedicated to the pupil his translation of Linacre's Grammar, one of the items of work done by him during his professorship in the College of Ste. Barbe; and in 1558, after this pupil, who had held a prominent position among Scottish nobles, died, probably from poison, at Dieppe, on his way home from the marriage of Mary Stuart to the Dauphin, along with the other three Scottish commissioners who had attended it, Buchanan celebrated him in emphatic Latin verse that is now better known than most contemporary epitaphs. Let it be told, however, to illustrate the cross-threads that run through the web of life, that Queen Mary, on 9th October 1564, granted to Buchanan, who had been her tutor also, and probably the most learned and intellectual of all her friends, a pension of ￡500 Scots, or ￡25 sterling a year, from the Abbey of Crossraguel; that the then Earl of Cassilis, son of Buchanan's old pupil, claimed the temporalities of that abbey as his own, and sometimes stopped temporarily, and often permanently diminished, the pension which had been granted by the Queen out of the spoils of the Reformation, tarnishing by pious Protestant greed the brightest page in the history of the earldom of Cassilis.

After Buchanan's tutorship of the father of this grasping Protestant was ended, and Buchanan was proposing to return to his old scholar's life in Paris, James V. detained him to act as tutor to one of his natural sons-not the one known afterwards as the Good Regent, but James Stewart, Prior of Coldingham. This king, who entertained the idea that the clergy ought not to disregard the moral law as if they were royal personages like himself, set Buchanan to the not uncongenial task, upon which Dunbar and Sir David Lindsay of the Mount had previously been engaged, of 'lashing the vices' of the clergy, and especially of the monks. In the form of a dream, Somnium, he represented to St. Francis the reasons of a decent man for refusing to enter this order of sainthood-reasons which, because of their truth, might satisfy a saint, but which also, because of their truth, would likely be disagreeable to sanctified hypocrites and scoundrels. Two palinodes, wearing the aspect of apologies, were seen by those who understood irony to be rather stinging aggravations of the original satire. After some months of a mixed tumult of priestly rage and secular laughter, the royal love of fun and of virtue again prompted Buchanan to renew the attack, which he did by beginning Franciscanus, not published till 1560, and then dedicated to the Regent Moray and gradually extended to a thousand Latin lines, which contain the most polished, skilfully contemptuous exposure of the arts, ignorance, and vices of the later generations of the Romish clergy in Scotland. It is still worth reading by all who enjoy rough, boisterous, coarse humour, as also by all anti-Papist fanatics, even if they should renew their Latin studies for nine months to enable them to understand and utilise it. These men, drenched with satire, published and unpublished, whose craft of various hues was endangered by it, of course thought that it would be judicious if not just to burn its author. Cardinal Beaton had him on his list of heretics,-for what heresy could be so dangerous as disbelief in the solid, well-fed, red-faced exponents of infallible truth? In 1539 he escaped from prison in Edinburgh[6] when his guards were asleep. But being warned after the King had received the MS. of The Franciscan that Beaton had offered this fickle monarch a price for his head, he felt constrained to bid farewell once more to his native country. He fled to England, but, as Henry VIII. was then busy burning all shades of believers that did not suit his personal fancy, Buchanan thought it prudent to trust his safety and his fortunes once more to Paris. On arriving there, however, he found that Cardinal Beaton was there before him as ambassador, so on the invitation of Andrew Gouvéa he withdrew to Bordeaux. There he taught three years at least in the public schools, and wrote four tragedies for the annual exhibitions of these schools, to wit The Baptist, Medea, Jepthes, and Alcestis. In the College of Guyenne he had Gouvéa as a principal, and as a pupil Montaigne, the celebrated sceptic, who is dogmatic enough to state in one of his essays that Gouvéa was 'without comparison the chiefest rector in France,' and that he himself had, as a principal actor, 'undergone and represented the chiefest parts in the Latin Tragedies of Buchanan.' When here, Beaton and the Franciscans harassed him until that fear was dispelled by the plague raging over Aquitaine and the death of his fickle patron, the King of Scots.

Next, about 1547, in the wake or under the convoy of Gouvéa, he migrated to Portugal in response to the invitation of the King to teach in a resuscitation of the University of Coimbra that was being then worked out at great expense for education in the liberal arts and the philosophy of Aristotle. Many of his friends, eminent for learning, were there before him, and he expected to find peace in that out of the way corner of the world. But Gouvéa died suddenly, and then all his enemies ran at him with open mouth. He was thrown into prison, charged with writing against the Franciscans and eating flesh in Lent. The Inquisitors tormented themselves and him for six months without stateable result; and then, thinking it prudent, and perhaps honest, to conceal that their toil had been in vain, they shut him up in a monastery to be converted to the true faith or to be prepared for the fagots. To the great scholar, however, the monks, though ignorant, behaved not unkindly. They allowed him the truest literary leisure and quiet he ever had except perhaps in St. Andrews; and he devoted it to the so-called translation of David's Psalms into Latin verse, which are in truth artistic evolutionary expositions from Hebrew hints, or splendid blossoms of sacred poetry grown from the seed given by the poet-king of Israel to the winds of heaven, in the moments of inspiration occurring in a life of suffering, of passion, and of hope. Never elsewhere did the iron fetters of Buchanan's own environment permit him to soar so close to the firmament.

When set at liberty, though the King of Portugal offered him the means of subsistence, he returned to England. But as affairs were then in disorder under a young king, he in a short time returned to France and celebrated the siege of Metz in a Latin poem, not without the approbation which rewarded all his efforts in that line of composition. Thereafter the Marshal de Brissac called him to Italy, and he lived with him and his son in Italy and France for four years till 1560, spending much time in writing his poem De Sph?ra, and in study of the religious controversies then seething through civilised Europe, and carrying it into a scientific region that rendered a poetic exposition of the Ptolemaic system a work of futility and utterly misspent power.

In 1561 he returned to his native country, and there indicated his Rationalistic leanings to the side of Protestantism. Nevertheless, the non-Protestant Mary Stuart, of ever-living memory in the realm of history and romance, pursued her studies in Livy and other classics with his help. As formerly mentioned, she endowed him with a pension of ￡500 a year. But in after years Mary's faults or her misfortunes threw them into the hostile camps that tore Scotland into confusion and deadly discord. In regard to the murder of Darnley, he came to the conclusion, on the evidence of open foes and of professed friends, that she was guilty. He preferred truth to the beautiful queen, and it is difficult to comprehend how any man capable of weighing and scrutinising such evidence as was accessible to him can blame him.[7]

Buchanan has been accused of ingratitude to Mary, his friend as well as his mistress, divinely gifted and divinely appointed. He may have been compelled to seem ungrateful through the lying of ill-informed Reformers and rogues; but sure am I that his Latin and other Humanist studies with that most fascinating and accomplished of women, or at least of queens, gave him the opportunity of forming an idea of her intellectual powers and unsurpassed personal charms that no other contemporary in Scotland was mentally and morally capable of forming, and I don't doubt that this idea finds sincere expression in his dedication to her of his version or paraphrase of the Psalms of the Hebrew poet-king, without any hint whatever of kindred royal frailties, or of tendencies thereto. What Buchanan must have seen in her when he had the best opportunity of sight and knowledge stands recorded unalterably in his noble verse that rolls down the centuries, bearing an impress of insight and sincerity unequalled in the poetical portraiture of queens till Tennyson laid his dedication at the feet of the most illustrious and fortunate of all her countless descendants. A true poet I believe to be a true seer, and incapable of falsehood to the extent that he has had the chance to see. But a true poet may be deceived. Spenser and Shakespeare were deceived into uttering gross flatteries about Queen Elizabeth; but they were deceived by the dense atmosphere of lying by which one of the cleverest, falsest, most hateful of women of all history encompassed herself. That Queen Mary should have been no worse than she was in a world with her royal cousin and rival flaunting her fictitious moral and physical beauties at the head of it, and getting prematurely canonised as the Good Queen Bess, ought certainly to qualify or blot out for ever all that can be stated truly and justly in condemnation or even grave censure of Queen Mary. Therefore let the modest and honest muse of History cease howling and canting about her crimes, and try to refrain from lavishing eulogy upon her kindred in position and in blood-Henry VIII., the Royal Bluebeard, and his inconstant, cruel, deceitful daughter-a pair of monarchs whose fickle affections led so many adventurous wives and ambitious wooers to the scaffold, by processes that involved the partial but temporary corruption of their country's conscience.

The wants and troubles of his country beset Buchanan with many a call of duty, and cast upon him loads of multifarious work, such as perhaps never in the history of human-kind before were thrown upon the most accomplished and studious of living men. The tasks assigned to Buchanan, and the duties imposed upon him, reflect no inconsiderable honour and credit upon his lawless, homicidal, half-civilised countrymen. While still friendly with Queen Mary, he gave effect to his Reformation convictions, by sitting and working for years, from 1563 onwards, as a member of the new-born democratic General Assembly, knowing well enough that it was an institution that the Queen would have been happy to see strangled, even before it began to discuss the scandals of Rizzio and Darnley with the plain-spoken impudence of a rustic kirk-session and the arrogance of an infallible tribunal. Buchanan was one of the Commissioners that revised the Book of Discipline, and, along with Knox and others, was a member of a committee appointed to confer regarding the causes that fell, or that ought to fall, within the jurisdiction of the Kirk. In 1567, a few days after the beginning of Mary's imprisonment in Lochleven, Buchanan filled the chair of the Moderator of the General Assembly, a position that for generations has not called for the worldly wisdom and terse, impatient talk of a layman, and seldom, if ever, so much required to be reminded of the limits of its power and jurisdiction as when Buchanan sat as its Moderator, and the head of the State was a captive.

In the previous year, Queen Mary's half-brother, the Earl of Moray, commendator of the Priory of St. Andrews, and as such patron of the Principalship of St. Leonard's College there, appointed Buchanan to that office, which he held for four years. During these years St. Leonard's, which in the first year was studentless, became the best attended of the three St. Andrews colleges. But the fame of the 'greatest poet of the age' could not permanently revive the fortunes of St. Leonard's, nor did the efforts of the Parliamentary Commission of 1579, of which Andrew Melville as well as Buchanan were members. By the time Dr. Johnson was on his way to the Hebrides, the College buildings were ruinous and forsaken, including St. Leonard's Church, of which the Doctor could not see the inside, because of decent excuses exciting in his mind the hope that 'Where there is still shame there may yet be virtue.'[8]

The Regent Moray, Buchanan's patron and friend, to whom the Franciscanus was dedicated, was a recognised mainstay of Protestantism, heartily hated by the allies of the Queen and of the Pope. He was assassinated in Linlithgow on 20th January 1570, partly to further their interests and partly to gratify private revenge. Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh was waiting for him in the house of his uncle, Archbishop Hamilton, with small-bore matchlock and lighted match, and the accident of a crowded street gave him the opportunity of a deliberate aim. His death was laid at the door of the Hamiltons, and it stirred the patriotism of Buchanan to write a political pamphlet, called an Admonition to the Trew Lordes, in the vernacular of Scotland, directed against the Hamiltons and their friends-a publication full of practical insight, good sense, and cogent argument, the work of a wise, earnest, sagacious man, who in the zeal for the good of his country forgot that he had the gift of poetic inspiration, in that respect very unlike his great successor Milton when he too became a political pamphleteer, more rhapsodical than relevant. He suspected the Hamiltons of a desire to secure the crown, and Buchanan very much preferred to them Queen Mary and her son, whose birth he had welcomed as a star of hope for his country. His birthday ode of welcome, ostensibly intended for the boy when he grew up, but positively in the meantime for the guidance and the warning of his mother, is in substance a serious homily on the duty of kings to God and the people, from whom their power came, and whose will and welfare alone justified its exercise. The essence of the De Jure Regni underlies it, an essence never practically intelligible to the fated House of Stuart. Neither the beautiful, brilliant Mary nor her erratic but not stupid race could understand the teaching of Buchanan as an exposition of the law of the King of kings. The fate of that race, from her flight to England to the flight from Culloden, has helped the world to understand it. They were doomed to be born in and live through ages of ignorance, superstition, and falsehood, in which few men arose who could discover and recognise truth and publish it at their risk for the dark here and the darker hereafter, as was done by Buchanan. He may not have been infallible, but he had insight, veracity, and courage, the like of which will never be exhibited by his traducers to the end of time. Those who can believe him guilty of base ingratitude and malicious falsehood are incapable of discriminating the best from the worst in human nature and in human history.

Buchanan's truthfulness and resolute desire to be impartial can be best inferred in our time from his History of Scotland, at which he had written for years, and for which he had collected materials from his boyhood. The style of it appears to be an eclectic adaptation of available and appropriate elements from the styles of Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus. It wants the special charm of 'Livy's pictured page,' for Scottish places, deeds, heroes, and tastes did not for Buchanan's earnest, realistic, dialectical, judicial mind present inducements to poetic word-painting-indeed, it was after his day, before the fascinations of the picturesque dawned upon the mind of Scotland, unless it may have been to some semi-mythical, mist-inspired member of the tribe of Ossian. The speeches of his History are the most tersely expressed, forcibly reasoned specimens of ancient Scottish oratory, assuming, of course, that they ought to have been delivered, but that they never were. They want the terse, pregnant suggestiveness of the orations of Tacitus; but they may probably appear to be not less skilfully adapted for the dramatic surroundings in which they are supposed to have been delivered. Young students of Latin, especially in the Aberdeen region, have found it to be for their interest to read and re-read Buchanan's History, and it is in the original that the literary art and linguistic skill of its author can be best seen. But it is still worth reading, and is often read in Dr. Watkins' translation, which as a translation reflects a good deal more credit upon its author than his old-womanly, newspapery but not dishonest attempt at original historical composition shown in his bringing down of Buchanan's masterly story to the culmination or extinction of Scottish history in the visit of George IV. to Edinburgh. The babes and sucklings of the school of Dry-as-dust assert that Buchanan is superseded as an historian; but a man of Buchanan's powers and opportunities can never be superseded as a narrator of the history of his own time.

Buchanan died on the 28th September 1582, a few days or weeks after his History had been published. He had striven, in spite of old age, ill-health, and poverty, to accomplish this long-meditated patriotic task; and when he had corrected the proofs and given it to the world, he felt that his last slender tie to life was broken, and his long, chequered, poorly-paid day's work was done.

His death took place in Kennedy's Close, the second close off the High Street of Edinburgh above the Tron Church, as recorded by 'George Paton, Antiquary,' upon the rather reliable authority of an ancient Lord Advocate, Sir James Stewart of Goodtrees.

His last lodging was in 'the first house in the turnpike above the tavern,' and occupied some few cubic feet of space, probably about twelve feet above the existing causeway blocks of Hunter Square, an entirely vanished pile of tall, substantial, over-populated masonry, part of the crest of the High Street once, standing within a quarter of a mile of the vanished garden in which Darnley was found dead in his shirt without mark of violence, still nearer to the site of the vanished house in which Walter Scott was born, and to the vacant air-space once filled by Johnny Dowie's vanished tavern, in which during his Edinburgh sojourn Robert Burns was wont to make merry with select friends.

The records of the Commissary Court show that Buchanan left no property except ￡100 of his Crossraguel pension (gifted by Queen Mary, and withheld as often and as long as he could by the Earl of Cassilis), which had been in arrear from the previous Whitsunday. His 'Inventar' exhibits him in his true character of an ancient philosopher, whether Stoic or not. The civic authorities of Edinburgh, who from time immemorial have been ready and willing to bury scholars, buried his body the day after his death at the public expense. The ground of Greyfriars, one of the spoils of the Reformation, was then being turned into a burying-ground, and Buchanan was the 'first person of celebrity' buried in it. The exact spot of his sepulture is, however, in doubt, though a small tablet was put up by a humble blacksmith to mark where it is believed to be-a tribute of hero-worship like to that in Parliament Square which is supposed to mark the burial-place of Knox.

It is not likely that Buchanan ever asked the Town Council of Edinburgh for bread, but it is believed that they gave him a stone-without any inscription, however, to show for whom it was intended, so that by 1701 it was lost or stolen. His skull also is believed to be one of the lawful and sacred possessions of the Edinburgh University. If genuine, it may be a phrenological curiosity. Sir W. Hamilton once used it at a lecture which was listened to and approved of by Thomas Carlyle. Sir William demonstrated to Carlyle's satisfaction that the said skull, supposed to be Buchanan's, was according to phrenological dogmas far inferior to that of some 'Malay cut-throat' or other unredeemed ruffian. Assuming this to be the fact-and my authority for believing it is a letter of Carlyle published in Veitch's Life of Sir W. Hamilton-I am surprised that Mr. Hosack and Sir John Skelton were not converted to phrenology. But for my part, believing in the universal but mostly untranslatable symbolism of Nature, from the 'flower in the crannied wall' to the human face and form divine, and believing only to a limited extent in phrenology as the dark side of physiognomy that is open to touch rather than to sight, I should hold that the skull which was inferior to a Malay's in any respect except thickness could never be the skull of Buchanan; and it would not alter my conviction to feel sure that George Combe was present at Sir William Hamilton's lecture, and for the first and only time in their career of phrenological disputation expressly agreed with him. Whatever Buchanan's head and face may have been like-and his portraits impute to him either sleepy, benevolent dulness, or ferrety, peevish conceit-it is not believable that his head or face could have ever resembled that of a Malay or any other kind of savage. So acute a logician as Sir W. Hamilton ought to have doubted one of his premises at least, and been able to conceive it possible that the resetters of dead men's skulls may be sometimes the victims of outside, as well as inside, deception.

* * *

EPILOGISTIC

The sudden and untimely death of Dr. Wallace has left this volume incomplete, and incapable of being completed as he would have done it. Detailed facts are in part awanting, but they are awanting in every biography and autobiography, and after the oblivion of centuries has passed over them, they tend to be unintelligible and uninteresting as lying remote from everyday experience. These, however, the inquiring reader, to his reasonable satisfaction, can find elsewhere; what he will never find elsewhere are Dr. Wallace's ultimate, deliberate, critical estimates of the life and work of Buchanan. His book, as it grew under his nimble pen, grew, probably unconsciously, to be not so much an articulation of the bare bones of fact as a narrative of the genesis, evolution, growth, and vitality of Buchanan's ideas, more especially his ideas affecting social democratic development, and in particular his capital heresy, dangerous for himself, but vital for the race, touching the 'rights of man.'

Few men of any country have had such versatility of talent, and have in life found tasks so varied as George Buchanan and Robert Wallace. No other Scotsman known to me, through credible report or in the flesh, has had the personal experience that would enable him so well to understand and interpret the personal experience of George Buchanan. Both were pre-eminent in the university learning of their respective eras, which had little in common except Latin; scholastic logic and metaphysic being the dominating study of Buchanan's days, as inductive positive science is of ours. Both were wandering scholars seeking for fortune, or at least for bread; each acting as tutor, schoolmaster, university professor, man of letters, theologian, politician, and teacher of public men who were too ignorant or too neglectful of honest rational principle to be fit to rule in mercy and in justice; both were doomed by circumstances or by conscience to poverty and the discrediting influences of poverty, though fit to furnish invaluable light and guidance to their fellow-men. Methinks the pre-Reformation church was a kinder, less harsh nursing-mother to the inquiring, doubting, hesitating, satirical Protestant, than the dry-as-dust nurses of ultra-Protestantism, agnosticism, atheism, and sincere worship of nothing except Mammon's golden calf were to the learned literary man of our day who, afflicted with distracting doubts himself, and many sorrows, could still give reasons for his faith in a supreme Creator and an administrator of the universe according to fixed law and unswerving right, and could help to lift the mind of his age out of a darkness deeper than Popery-the blackness of atheistic despair. Both knew about politics as revealed in the wrangling of churches or religious sects, and the strife of factions intriguing and fighting for power to govern or to misgovern. The politics familiar to Buchanan included the ethics that prompted and the arts that effected the murders of Cardinal Beaton, Rizzio, Darnley, Regent Moray, and Queen Mary, and that often imperilled his own life. Nevertheless, worn out by his years and assiduous labours, he died in his bed when his work was done, a fortnight after his History of his country was published, and before his old pupil the Scottish Solomon had time to discover all the treason it contained; ordered his servant to give his few last coins to a beggar, and left the care of his funeral to all whom it might concern on Christian, natural, civic, and sanitary grounds, ending his long, busy, chequered tenure of time with that courage and hope which gilds the last sunset of those who have striven to do right and never doubted that God is just.

There was no man in Scotland or in Europe that could have been of so much service to Scotland in guiding it through the troubles and storms, political, moral, and religious, of the Reformation as Buchanan, if the people of Scotland, more especially the feudal lords of Scotland, had been fit to follow the dictates of the broadest, most complete worldly wisdom, and of the clear conscience of one who had spent his years in study and in poverty, who had lived the life of a stranger to the entanglements of foolish pleasure and the illusions of earthly hope, who had the most of his possible life behind him and eternity in no distant prospect, and who had no conceivable motive to applaud murder or to tell lies. Sceptical by innate constitution, and educated to doubt in the schools of adversity and experience, personal and historical, he was not the man to commit himself hastily to faith in dark dogmas and half-explored truths; he was the man to be a cautious, judicious reformer, not the man to be an impetuous, frantic destroyer, too rash and unrestrained to discriminate between the entirely and partially unsound, too just to plunder churchmen, some of them profligate, in order to enrich feudal lords skilled in few arts except the arts of war and theft. Like Erasmus and Beza, he saw that the old order of society was dissolving; but, like all wise men, he preferred slow and gradual to revolutionary change.

John Knox, in point of culture and of pure intellect and reason, was a small man-a rash, daring, half-educated schoolboy, compared with Buchanan. Knowledge and reason are conservative forces, and Knox could not have been great had he not been a destroyer. His most indelible historical records are the ruins of cathedrals and other religious houses, 'rooks' nests' requiring to be pulled down only in the judgment of blind superstition and rabid fanaticism. For the ignorance and savagery of the people of Scotland the Church of Rome was primarily to blame. That Church required reformation, moral and intellectual; but no spiritual entity, however corrupt, can be miraculously reformed by the destruction of Gothic or any other architecture which took its form under the sincere art and piety of buried generations. Cardinal Beaton's mode of burning good true men to support and preserve the divine truth that had vitalised his Church for centuries was irrational and infernal; but it was not very much worse than the mad, destructive fury inspired by John Knox's 'excellent' sermons, which, whatever their merits, can scarcely have emanated from a mind that had any clear comprehension of the processes by which spiritual truth makes its way and holds its power effectively among mankind. Beaton and Knox were both powerful in their age and characteristic of it, but they would have found no conspicuous function in an age that was not in the course of emerging from the mire of savagery, with all its tendencies to violence and to vice. Both alike were uncompromising enemies of individual freedom, and equally bent upon the suppression of all conscientious opinions that did not concur with their own. Both were patriots, and of signal service to Scotland; but the evil they did so nearly counterbalances all the good they did (which might, and would, in time have been done by less unscrupulous, ungentle instruments), that it might have been well had Scotland been liberated by Providence from the piebald burden of both of them.[9]

Buchanan as a scholar was a very large inheritor of the wisdom of many ages, the largest inheritor of that rare kind of wealth of all the Scotsmen of his day. He was by nature somewhat of a sceptic, the teacher in Latin-and who can tell what beside?-of Montaigne-most candid and sincere of sceptics-by necessity a doubter, as true seekers of truth, especially in dark, troubled, fermenting ages, cannot help being. He was a philosopher-a Stoic probably, as most impecunious philosophers are compelled to be more or less, capable of bearing the inevitable with patience, and of waiting to solve difficulties by skill and cautious experiment rather than by violence or deceit! What his worldly wisdom and great intellectual power might have done for the good of his country opens up a wide field of conjecture touching the solution of most of the big problems of his age. Why should the clever, beautiful Queen Mary not have trusted him as an adviser rather than Scotch rakes and traitors and Italian fiddlers? Why should her race, more gifted than most royal races, have hugged a delusion about the Divine right of kings along the precipices overhanging death and ruin? Why should the Reformers, who had the means of ascertaining that among them he was a veritable Saul among the prophets, and neither a fanatic nor a hypocrite, not have utilised his wisdom and his inspiration of the beautiful and the true to direct the course and shape the limits of the Reformation, without proclaiming a barbarian, everlasting divorce between the power of truth and the beauty of holiness? Why should the spiritual force and illumination of every great man who did not wear fine raiment and fare sumptuously every day, of the prophets of Jud?a and the sages of Greece and Rome, have been lost upon their contemporaries and left to find its way and its expanding efficacy in the slow course of centuries? Buchanan's lot was the common lot of unendowed, and therefore unappreciated, genius. The greatest scholar and writer of his own country in his own time, one of the most potent of the intellectual aristocracy of Europe for all time, he was a rustic in dress, a plain, unpretentious, non-assertive inhabitant of the European villages called cities, known to him as St. Andrews and Edinburgh; a man pure of life in a vicious, half-decent age; loyal to truth so far as it was possible for him to discover it among contemporaries prone to falsehood and ready for the perpetration of it by forgery or any other effective and not unpracticable mode, he was esteemed a stranger in his native land, and not a Solon or a seer except by the more cultured of his own unlettered generation; to subsequent vulgar generations he was so unknown or so forgotten as to fill, in their rude Temple of Fame, the niche of a mythical court-jester and coarse wit or witling; nevertheless he holds a title to lasting remembrance as sure as the story of the Reformation and the era of the never-to-be-forgotten Mary Stuart can give; also the unique distinction of being the greatest master of the Latin language since it died as a vernacular, and became the immortal medium of intercommunication for the wide, high, and cold republic of scholars and thinkers, scattered through realms of ether and cloudland, and lit by volcanic fire and spiritual aurora fitfully lifting the night from peaks of rock and ice.

* * *

FOOTNOTES

[1] When I first heard from one of my early schoolmasters the medi?val chestnut, Quid distat inter sotum et Scotum?-Mensa tantum. ('What divides a sot (fool) from a Scot?-Only the table')-the reply was credited to Buchanan.

[2] He was Buchanan's assistant, and called the king's 'Pedagogue,' Buchanan being called 'Master.'

[3] Certain emoluments arising to the feudal superior (in this case the king); which, as they depend on uncertain events, are termed casualties.

[4] This covers the meaning more accurately than 'Physicians.'

[5] Burns appears to have afterwards written it down thus:-

'The Solemn League and Covenant

Now brings a smile, now brings a tear;

But sacred Freedom, too, was theirs:

If thou'rt a slave, indulge thy sneer.'

The form may be improved, the sentiment could not be.

[6] My authority is Herkless's Cardinal Beaton, p. 153.

[7] My non-forensic sympathy, but not my full conviction, goes with Mr. Hosack and Sir John Skelton in their chivalrous but too unmeasured defence of Mary. My verdict in regard to her being 'art and part' in putting an end to that traitor in heart and deed, the good-for-nothing, faithless fool Darnley, is a hesitant 'Not Proven'; but if otherwise, then a distinct non-hesitant 'served him right.' Skelton's clever, interesting book upon Maitland of Lethington, Mary's most faithful and capable minister, does not throw much, if any, light upon Buchanan. In it he is treated as an opposition pleader, capable rather than scrupulous, who did not know all the facts, and who was instructed by men who had other purposes to serve than telling the whole truth, and who probably did not know it themselves so well as Skelton had opportunities to come to know it, e.g. in regard to the 'Casket Letters'-documents that could be satisfactory to no modern tribunal except a Dreyfus court-martial. Buchanan's attack, in a pamphlet written in Scotch, upon Skelton's hero Maitland, entitled The Chameleon, Skelton sneers at as a 'Dawb'-not entirely an inaccurate criticism, for The Chameleon is a caricature, and that, of course, means an exaggeration of all faults, actual or presumable. But when a 'chameleon' like Disraeli or Maitland, both of whom have found in John Skelton an ingenious and eloquent hero-worshipper, is assailed by satirists in Punch or elsewhere, the only effective condemnatory judgment worth stating is that the caricature is not recognisable by an honest enemy or a free and easy friend. For my part, I believe that the unvarnished truth, though perhaps not the whole of it, can be better inferred from Buchanan than from Skelton.

[8] Sir David Brewster, when Principal of the United College of St. Leonard and St. Salvador, had a residence close to St. Leonard's roofless church. In 1853, Sir David told to a breakfast-party of students, which included Dr. Wallace and the writer, that his house embraced all that existed of Buchanan's old dwelling-house, and pointed out one particular part of the ancient outer wall thick enough to resist the artillery of Buchanan's day. Dr. Johnson's general contempt for Scotland, which did not keep silence in St. Andrews, could not resist the inspiration of the genius loci of St. Leonard's so far as to prevent his generously recognising Buchanan's claim to immortality as being as fair as modern Latinity can give, and 'perhaps fairer than the instability of vernacular languages admit.'

[9] Carlyle's estimate of Knox I accept and credit as the estimate of as penetrating an insight and as true a conscience as ever uttered the verdicts of history; but it is the estimate of a mind that could discover more to approve in the storm than in the sunshine, and who too readily infers noble motives from splendid results. I believe all the good he imputes to Knox and his life-battle for truth, and I don't believe sufficiently in the vileness of human nature to believe in any of the charges of immorality which rival ecclesiastics have persisted in relating against him. But for all that, I am not blind to his human imperfections. I am far from thinking him to be a perfect man, much less a perfect Christian. His wild joy and unbridled merriment over the dying miseries of Cardinal Beaton and of Mary of Guise would be scarcely in harmony with the budding benevolence of a half-reformed cannibal. His virtues were genuine, and not hypocritical, but they were essentially Pagan virtues-gifts of nature, tested and strengthened, but not acquired, through his experiences as a notary and an ecclesiastic.

* * *

INDEX

Admonition to Trew Lords, the, 130.

?schylus, 15.

Agamemnon, 15.

Arius, 91.

Ascham, Roger, 81.

Atonement, the, 90.

Augustine, 99.

Aurelius, Marcus, 100.

Baptistes, the, 57, 58.

Beaton, Cardinal, 122, 139.

Begging letter-writer, 31.

Beza, 81.

Bo?tius, 66, 100.

Bordeaux, 58.

Brahe, Tycho, 44, 81.

Brissac, Marshal of, 51.

Brewster, Sir D., 129.

Brown, P. Hume, 18.

Buchanan, George-

Writings burned by hangman, 9.

Milton and Buchanan's De Jure, 10.

Effect of the De Jure, 11.

Relations to the Scaligers, 13.

Wordsworth on Buchanan, 14.

Porson and Buchanan, 15.

Milton's opinion of him, 15.

Hallam's estimate of him, 16.

Froude's opinion of him, 16.

Buchanan's scholarship, 17.

His Detectio Mari? Regin?, 18.

The Marians and Buchanan, 20.

The chapbook Buchanan, 21.

His humour, 22.

Interview with Melvilles, 23.

The Countess of Mar and, 25.

Division of his life into periods of preparation and performance, 27.

Why he became a Protestant, 28.

Joseph Scaliger's elegy on, 31.

Begging letter-writer, 31.

Letters to Mary, Queen of Scots, 32.

Letters to Earl of Moray, 32.

Comparison between Erasmus and, 35.

Hospitality of Roman Catholic days, 36.

His influence on cultured Europe, 38.

Parallel between his conduct and that of to-day, 39.

No loss of self-respect, 40.

No notoriety hunter, 41.

No money grabber, 43.

Did not seek power, 48.

Dates and aims of his works, 50.

Moderator of General Assembly, 51.

Various appointments held, 51.

Aids in drawing up First Book of Discipline, 51.

Appointed Principal of St. Leonard's College, 51.

Secretary to the Scots Commission re Mary, 51.

Opinion of Sir James Melville of, 52.

Not to be blamed for James VI.'s pedantry, 57.

Dedicates his three great works to the king-Baptistes, De Jure, and the History, 57.

Examination of the Prefaces to these, 58-65.

Resembled a Scots Stoic philosopher, 66.

His courtly manners, 70.

Alleged vindictiveness towards Morton disproved, 72.

His policy regarding Scots affairs, 76.

Further disproof of Sir J. Melville's remarks, 80.

His religious views, 83.

The Scots Reformation position, 83-88.

His relations to Calvinism, 89-96.

Not a zealot, 90.

His views of Evangelium, 90.

His pension, 92.

His dirge upon Calvin, 93.

His period of doubt, 98.

Why he never took orders, 101.

Is Conformity allowable? 104.

Renaissance morals, 106.

Buchanan's amorist poetry, 107.

Biographical facts, 111.

The Roman Catholic Church and education, 112.

Lords of the Congregation and education, 114.

His early years of education, 116.

Enlists as a volunteer to invade England, 118.

Life at St. Andrews University, 119.

Proceeds to St. Barbe, 119.

Friendship with Earl of Cassilis, 119.

James V. invites him to write Franciscanus, 121.

Leaves him to the vengeance of Beaton, 122.

Escapes from prison to the Continent, 122.

Migrates to Portugal: seized by the Inquisition, 123.

Imprisoned in a monastery, where he translates the Psalms, 123.

Returns to Scotland and declares for Protestantism, 124.

Relations between Mary and Buchanan, 125.

Accused of ingratitude towards her, 126.

The multifariousness of his work, 128.

Writes Admonition to the Trew Lords, 130.

Characteristics of his History of Scotland, 132.

Buchanan's last days, 133.

His burial-place and property, 135.

Legend of his skull, 135.

Characteristics, 136.

Final summing up, 137-145.

Parallel drawn between Dr. Wallace and Buchanan, 138.

Burns, 107, 116.

Calvin, J., 82, 89, 90, 92, 94, 100.

Cameron, 115.

Cargill, 115.

Carlyle, T., 34, 143.

Casaubon, 13.

Cassilis, Lord, 51, 119, 134.

Catullus, 66.

Chameleon, the, 50, 126.

Chapbooks on Buchanan, 21.

Charles II., 9.

Cicero, 67.

Coimbra, college of, 51, 98.

Collége de Guyenne, 58.

Congregation, Lords of, 114, 115.

Covenanters, 115.

Darnley, 128, 134, 139.

Dawes, Canon, 15.

Detectio Mari? Regin?, 18, 50.

Diogenes, 69.

Dionysius, Lambinus, 67.

Dirge, the, 92.

Discipline, Book of, 112.

Divine right, 9, 11, 50, 57.

Dryden, John, 10.

Dunbar, William, 121.

Education in Catholic days, 113.

Election, doctrine of, 90.

Elizabeth, Queen, 127.

England, invasion of, 118.

Erasmus, 13, 34, 96, 99, 100.

Eucharistic controversy, 99.

Evangelicals, the, 89.

France, 124.

Franciscanus, the, 50, 90, 98, 106, 121.

Gamaliel, 58.

General Assembly of Church of Scotland, 51.

Genethliacon, the, 56.

Gibbon, 67, 118.

Gouvéa, André de, 58, 122, 123.

Hackney, the, 75.

Hamilton, Sir W., 135.

Hebrew Psalms, 43, 123.

Henry VIII., 127.

Heriot, J., 116.

Herod, King, 58.

Herodias, 58.

History of Scotland, 50, 57, 63, 132.

Horace, 66.

Hosack, 20.

Humanists, 27, 28, 43, 58, 83, 84, 126.

Incarnation, the, 90.

Indulgences, 90.

Inquisition, the, 43, 98.

James IV., 112.

James V., 50, 120.

James VI., 46, 52, 56, 76.

Johnson, S., 15, 129.

Justification by Faith, 86, 90.

Killearn, 111.

Knox, J., 11, 37, 40, 75, 76, 81, 85, 92, 101, 102, 114, 115, 141.

Latin Style, 17, 27, 132.

'Lena' poetry, the, 106.

Lennox, Earl of, 33, 37.

Leo X., 84.

Lincoln's Inn Fields, 9.

Livy, 31, 51, 132.

Luther, 84.

Lyndsay, Sir D., 50, 121.

Macauslan, 111.

Major, John, 65.

Mar, Countess of, 24, 81.

Mary, Queen of Scots, 19, 31, 37, 40, 51, 64, 75, 92, 120, 127, 128, 139.

Mary of Guise, 102.

Melville, Andrew and James, 23, 40, 81, 102, 115.

Melville, Sir James, 52, 80.

Milton, John, 9, 10.

Moderator of Assembly, 51, 128.

Montaigne, 119.

Moray, Earl of, 32, 33, 37, 51, 81, 92, 121, 129, 130, 139.

Morton, Earl of, 73, 74, 75, 79.

Ne?ra pieces, 108.

Nicene Dogmas, 86.

Oxford University, 9.

Pan?tius, 67.

Paris, University of, 116.

Paten, Guy, 16.

Pension, 92.

Petrus, Victorinus, 67.

Porson, 15.

Portugal, 43, 51, 98, 123.

Predestinarianism, 86.

Principal of St. Leonard's, 51.

Private judgment, 86.

Randolph, Sir T., 63, 71, 81.

Reformation, Scots, 11, 83, 85, 87, 120.

Renaissance, the, 83, 87, 96, 106.

Revolutions, English, American, and French, 11.

Rizzio, 128, 139.

Roman Catholic hospitality, 36.

-- -- Church, 28, 97, 99, 101.

Russell, Lord William, 9.

St. Andrews, University of, 118, 129.

Sallust, 132.

Scaligers, the, 12, 13, 30, 48, 81.

Scott, Sir W., 116.

Seneca, 63, 67, 100.

Shairp, Principal, 107.

Shakespeare, 12, 15.

Skelton, Sir J., 20, 125.

Skull, Buchanan's, 135.

Socrates, 69, 100.

Stephanus, 12.

Stevenson, R. L., 107.

Stoic philosopher, 53, 63, 66, 69, 73, 82, 100.

Tacitus, 132.

Tennyson, 12, 127.

Thackeray, 34, 81.

Thyestes, the, 63.

Transubstantiation, 90.

Wordsworth, W., 14.

Young, Peter, 53, 55, 57, 62.

* * *

OPINIONS OF THE PRESS ON THE 'FAMOUS SCOTS' SERIES.

Of THOMAS CARLYLE, by H. C. Macpherson,

The British Weekly says:-

'We congratulate the publishers on the in every way attractive appearance of the first volume of their new series. The typography is everything that could be wished, and the binding is most tasteful.... We heartily congratulate author and publishers on the happy commencement of this admirable enterprise.'

The Literary World says:-

'One of the very best little books on Carlyle yet written, far outweighing in value some more pretentious works with which we are familiar.'

The Scotsman says:-

'As an estimate of the Carlylean philosophy, and of Carlyle's place in literature and his influence in the domains of morals, politics, and social ethics, the volume reveals not only care and fairness, but insight and a large capacity for original thought and judgment.'

The Glasgow Daily Record says:-

'Is distinctly creditable to the publishers, and worthy of a national series such as they have projected.'

The Educational News says:-

'The book is written in an able, masterly, and painstaking manner.'

Of ALLAN RAMSAY, by Oliphant Smeaton,

The Scotsman says:-

'It is not a patchwork picture, but one in which the writer, taking genuine interest in his subject, and bestowing conscientious pains on his task, has his materials well in hand, and has used them to produce a portrait that is both lifelike and well balanced.'

The People's Friend says:-

'Presents a very interesting sketch of the life of the poet, as well as a well-balanced estimate and review of his works.'

The Edinburgh Dispatch says:-

'The author has shown scholarship and much enthusiasm in his task.'

The Daily Record says:-

'The kindly, vain, and pompous little wig-maker lives for us in Mr. Smeaton's pages.'

The Glasgow Herald says:-

'A careful and intelligent study.'

Of HUGH MILLER, by W. Keith Leask,

The Expository Times says:-

'It is a right good book and a right true biography.... There is a very fine sense of Hugh Miller's greatness as a man and a Scotsman; there is also a fine choice of language in making it ours.'

The Bookseller says:-

'Mr. Leask gives the reader a clear impression of the simplicity, and yet the greatness, of his hero, and the broad result of his life's work is very plainly and carefully set forth. A short appreciation of his scientific labours, from the competent pen of Sir Archibald Geikie, and a useful bibliography of his works, complete a volume which is well worth reading for its own sake, and which forms a worthy instalment in an admirable series.'

The Daily News says:-

'Leaves on us a very vivid impression.'

Of JOHN KNOX, by A. Taylor Innes,

Mr. Hay Fleming, in The Bookman says:-

'A masterly delineation of those stirring times in Scotland, and of that famous Scot who helped so much to shape them.'

The Freeman says:-

'It is a concise, well written, and admirable narrative of the great Reformer's life, and in its estimate of his character and work it is calm, dispassionate, and well balanced.... It is a welcome addition to our Knox literature.'

The Speaker says:-

'There is vision in this book, as well as knowledge.'

The Sunday School Chronicle says:-

'Everybody who is acquainted with Mr. Taylor Innes's exquisite lecture on Samuel Rutherford will feel instinctively that he is just the man to do justice to the great Reformer, who is more to Scotland 'than any million of unblameable Scotsmen who need no forgiveness.' His literary skill, his thorough acquaintance with Scottish ecclesiastical life, his religious insight, his chastened enthusiasm, have enabled the author to produce an excellent piece of work.... It is a noble and inspiring theme, and Mr. Taylor Innes has handled it to perfection.'

Of ROBERT BURNS, by Gabriel Setoun,

The New Age says:-

'It is the best thing on Burns we have yet had, almost as good as Carlyle's Essay and the pamphlet published by Dr. Nichol of Glasgow.'

The Methodist Times says:-

'We are inclined to regard it as the very best that has yet been produced. There is a proper perspective, and Mr. Setoun does neither praise nor blame too copiously.... A difficult bit of work has been well done, and with fine literary and ethical discrimination.'

Youth says:-

'It is written with knowledge, judgment, and skill.... The author's estimate of the moral character of Burns is temperate and discriminating; he sees and states his evil qualities, and beside these he places his good ones in their fulness, depth, and splendour. The exposition of the special features marking the genius of the poet is able and penetrating.'

Of THE BALLADISTS, by John Geddie,

The Birmingham Daily Gazette says:-

'As a popular sketch of an intensely popular theme, Mr. Geddie's contribution to the "Famous Scots Series" is most excellent.'

The Publishers' Circular says:-

'It may be predicted that lovers of romantic literature will re-peruse the old ballads with a quickened zest after reading Mr. Geddie's book. We have not had a more welcome little volume for many a day.'

The New Age says:-

'One of the most delightful and eloquent appreciations of the ballad literature of Scotland that has ever seen the light.'

The Spectator says:-

'The author has certainly made a contribution of remarkable value to the literary history of Scotland. We do not know of a book in which the subject has been treated with deeper sympathy or out of a fuller knowledge.'

Of RICHARD CAMERON, by Professor Herkless,

The Freeman says:-

'Professor Herkless has made us all his debtors by his thorough-going and unwearied research, by his collecting materials from out-of-the-way quarters, and making much that was previously vague and shadowy clear and distinct.'

The Christian News says:-

'This volume is ably written, is full of interest and instruction, and enables the reader to form a conception of the man who in his day and generation gave his life for Christ's cause and kingdom.'

The Dundee Courier says:-

'In selecting Professor Herkless to prepare this addition to the "Famous Scots Series" of books, the publishers have made an excellent choice. The vigorous, manly style adopted is exactly suited to the subject, and Richard Cameron is presented to the reader in a manner as interesting as it is impressive.... Professor Herkless has done remarkably well, and the portrait he has so cleverly delineated of one of Scotland's most cherished heroes is one that will never fade.'

Of SIR JAMES YOUNG SIMPSON, by Eve Blantyre Simpson,

The Speaker says:-

'This little book is full of insight and knowledge, and by many picturesque incidents and pithy sayings it helps us to understand in a vivid and intimate sense the high qualities and golden deeds which rendered Sir James Simpson's strenuous life impressive and memorable.'

The Daily Chronicle says:-

'It is indeed long since we have read such a charmingly-written biography as this little Life of the most typical and "Famous Scot" that his countrymen have been proud of since the time of Sir Walter.... There is not a dull, irrelevant, or superfluous page in all Miss Simpson's booklet, and she has performed the biographer's chief duty-that of selection-with consummate skill and judgment.'

The Leeds Mercury says:-

'The narrative throughout is well balanced, and the biographer has been wisely advised in giving prominence to her father's great achievement-the introduction of chloroform-and what led to it.'

Of THOMAS CHALMERS, by W. Garden Blaikie,

The Spectator says:-

'The most notable feature of Professor Blaikie's book-and none could be more commendable-is its perfect balance and proportion. In other words, justice is done equally to the private and to the public life of Chalmers, if possible greater justice than has been done by Mrs. Oliphant.'

The Scottish Congregationalist says:-

'No one can read the admirable and vivid sketch of his life which Dr. Blaikie has written without feeling admiration for the man, and gaining inspiration from his example.'

Of JAMES BOSWELL, by W. Keith Leask,

The Spectator says:-

'This is one of the best volumes of the excellent "Famous Scots Series," and one of the fairest and most discriminating biographies of Boswell that have ever appeared.'

The Dundee Advertiser says:-

'It is the admirable manner in which the very complexity of the man is indicated that makes W. Keith Leask's biography of him one of peculiar merit and interest.... It is not only a life of Boswell, but a picture of his time-vivid, faithful, impressive.'

The Morning Leader says:-

'Mr. W. K. Leask has approached the biographer of Johnson in the only possible way by which a really interesting book could have been arrived at-by way of the open mind.... The defence of Boswell in the concluding chapter of his delightful study is one of the finest and most convincing passages that have recently appeared in the field of British biography.'

Of TOBIAS SMOLLETT, by Oliphant Smeaton,

The Dundee Courier says:-

'It is impossible to read the pages of this little work without being struck not only by its historical value, but by the fairness of its criticism.'

The Weekly Scotsman says:-

'The book is written in a crisp and lively style.... The picture of the great novelist is complete and lifelike. Not only does Mr. Smeaton give a scholarly sketch and estimate of Smollett's literary career, he constantly keeps the reader in conscious touch and sympathy with his personality, and produces a portrait of the man as a man which is not likely to be readily forgotten.'

The Newsagent and Booksellers' Review says:-

'Tobias Smollett was versatile enough to deserve a distinguished place in any gallery of gifted Scots, such as the one to which Mr. Smeaton has contributed this clever and lifelike portrait.'

Of FLETCHER OF SALTOUN, by W. G. T. Omond,

The Edinburgh Evening News says:-

'The writer has given us in brief compass the pith of what is known about an able and patriotic if somewhat dogmatic and impracticable Scotsman who lived in stormy times.... Mr. Omond describes, in a clear, terse, vigorous way, the constitution of the Old Scots Parliament, and the part taken by Fletcher as a public man in the stormy debates that took place prior to the union of the Parliaments in 1707. This part of the book gives an admirable summary of the state of Scottish politics and of the national feeling at an important period.'

The Leeds Mercury says:-

'Unmistakably the most interesting and complete story of the life of Fletcher of Saltoun that has yet appeared. Mr. Omond has had many facilities placed at his disposal, and of these he has made excellent use.'

The Speaker says:-

'Mr. Omond has told the story of Fletcher of Saltoun in this monograph with ability and judgment.'

Of THE BLACKWOOD GROUP, by Sir George Douglas,

The Scotsman says:-

'In brief compass, Sir George Douglas gives us skilfully blended together much pleasantly written biography and just and judicious criticism.'

The Weekly Citizen says:-

'It need not be said that to every one interested in the literature of the first half of the century, and especially to every Scotsman so interested, "The Blackwood Group" is a phrase abounding in promise. And really Sir George Douglas fulfils the promise he tacitly makes in his title. He is intimately acquainted not only with the books of the different members of the "group," but also with their environment, social and otherwise. Besides, he writes with sympathy as well as knowledge.'

Of NORMAN MACLEOD, by John Wellwood,

The Star says:-

'A worthy addition to the "Famous Scots Series" is that of Norman Macleod, the renowned minister of the Barony of Glasgow, and a man as typical of everything generous and broadminded in the State Church in Scotland as Thomas Guthrie was in the Free Churches. The biography is the work of John Wellwood, who has approached it with proper appreciation of the robustness of the subject.'

The Scots Pictorial says:-

'Its general picturesqueness is effective, while the criticism is eminently liberal and sound.'

The Daily Free Press says:-

'It is one of the great merits of Mr. Wellwood's book that it is wholly free from dulness. His attention once secured, the reader is carried irresistibly along till he has finished the whole of the fascinating story.'

The Daily Chronicle says:-

'Mr. Wellwood is in thorough sympathy with his hero, and has given us in this little volume a graphic and picturesque sketch of him.'

Of SIR WALTER SCOTT, by George Saintsbury,

The Pall Mall Gazette says:-

'Mr. Saintsbury's miniature is a gem of its kind.... Mr. Saintsbury's critique of the Waverley Novels will, I venture to think, despite all that has been written upon them, discover fresh beauties for their admirers.'

The Morning Leader says:-

'A fresh and charming biography.'

The St. James's Gazette says:-

'Apart from Lockhart, we do not know any one who has given a better picture of Scott than Mr. Saintsbury, and there is no sounder and more comprehensive estimate of his work.'

The Scots Magazine says:-

'The little volume is bright, informative reading, and is a worthy addition to a capital and much-needed series.'

Of KIRKCALDY OF GRANGE, by Louis A. Barbé,

The Scotsman says:-

'Mr. Barbé's sketch sticks close to the facts of his life, and these are sought out from the best sources and are arranged with much judgment, and on the whole with an impartial mind.'

The Glasgow Herald says:-

'A conscientious and thorough piece of work, showing wide and accurate knowledge.'

The Speaker says:-

'This scholarly monograph seeks to unravel the seeming contradictions of a great career, as well as to show that Kirkcaldy of Grange was a sincere patriot.'

The Bookseller says:-

'Mr. Barbé has put together a very instructive and interesting account of his career.'

Of ROBERT FERGUSSON, by Dr. A. B. Grosart,

The Westminster Gazette says:-

'One of the most interesting of the "Famous Scots" Series is devoted to "Robert Fergusson" the poet, to whom "the greater Robert," as he freely acknowledged, was under so many obligations. Dr. Grosart is perhaps the best living authority on all that relates to the bard of "The Farmer's Ingle," and he gives many new facts and corrects a number of erroneous statements that have hitherto obtained currency respecting him. We have read it with genuine pleasure.'

The British Weekly says:-

'It is a creditable, useful, and painstaking book, a genuine contribution to Scottish literary history.'

The North British Daily Mail says:-

'The little volume is a thoroughly competent piece of work, and forms a valuable addition to an excellent series.'

The Weekly Scotsman says:-

'The book will be welcomed as a worthy addition to that wonderfully entertaining and instructive series of biographies, the "Famous Scots."

Of JAMES THOMSON, by William Bayne,

The Daily News says:-

'A just appreciation of Thomson as poet and dramatist, and an interesting record of the conditions under which he rose to fame, as also of his friendships with the great ones of the eighteenth century.'

Literature says:-

'The story of Thomson's claim to the disputed authorship of "Rule Britannia" is sustained by his countryman with spirit, and in our judgment with success.'

The Publishers' Circular says:-

'The book is one which every lover of Thomson will welcome, and which students of poetry cannot well afford to neglect.'

The Spectator says:-

'This is one of the compactest and best written volumes of the useful series of biographies to which it belongs.'

Of MUNGO PARK, by T. Banks Maclachlan,

The Leeds Mercury says:-

'We owe to Mr. Maclachlan not only a charming life-story, if at times a pathetic one, but a vivid chapter in the romance of Africa. Geography has no more wonderful tale than that dealing with the unravelling of the mystery of the Niger.'

The Speaker says:-

'Mr. Maclachlan recounts with incisive vigour the story of Mungo Park's heroic wanderings and the services which he rendered to geographical research.'

The Kilmarnock Herald says:-

'It is a thrilling story, powerfully told, of one of Scotland's noblest sons.'

The Educational News says:-

'Mungo Park has his record here summarised in such a manner as to win, inform, and delight.'

Of DAVID HUME, by Henry Calderwood,

The Speaker says:-

'The little book is a virile recruit of the "Famous Scots Series."'

'This monograph is both picturesque and critical.'

The New Age says:-

'To the many students of philosophy in Scotland a special interest will attach to Professor Calderwood's sketch of David Hume from the fact that it is the last piece of work done by its lamented author; and very pleasing it is to note the fairness and charity of the judgment passed by the most evangelical of philosophers upon the man who used to be denounced as the prophet of infidelity.'

The Scotsman says:-

'Fulfils admirably well the purpose of the writer, which was that of presenting in clear, fair, and concise lines Hume and his philosophy to the mind of his countrymen and of the world.'

The Publishers' Circular says:-

'This biography is well written, and it will no doubt be considered, as it really is, one of the best of the "Famous Scots Series."'

Of WILLIAM DUNBAR, by Oliphant Smeaton,

The Speaker says:-

'Mr. Smeaton looks narrowly into the characteristics of Dunbar's genius, and does well to insist on the almost Shakespearian range of his gifts. He contends that in elegy, as well as in satire and allegory, Dunbar's place in English literature is amongst the great masters of the craft of letters.'

The Glasgow Herald says:-

'This is a bright and picturesquely written monograph, presenting in readable form the results of the critical research undertaken by Laing, Schipper, and the other scholars who during the present century have done so much for the elucidation of the greatest of our early Scottish poets.'

The Bailie says:-

'A graphic and informed account not only of the man and his works, but of his immediate environment and of the times in which he lived.'

The Bookman says:-

'The book is an admirable biography, one of the liveliest and most readable in the series.'

Of SIR WILLIAM WALLACE, by Professor Murison,

The Speaker says:-

'Mr. Murison is to be congratulated on this little book. After much hard and discriminative labour he has pieced together by far the best, one might say the only rational and coherent, account of Wallace that exists.'

Mr. William Wallace in the Academy says:-

'Professor Murison has acquitted himself of his task like a patriot.'

'Capital reading.'

The Daily News says:-

'A scholarly and impartial little volume, one of the best yet published in the "Famous Scots Series."'

The Pall Mall Gazette says:-

'A bright little book which will be much relished north of the Tweed, and also among those Scottish exiles who are supposed to be pining away their lives south of it.'

The New Age says:-

'Anyhow, here, at least, we have his life-story-a most difficult tale to tell-recorded with a painstaking research and in a spirit of appreciative candour which leave almost nothing to be desired.'

Of ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, by Margaret Moyes Black,

The Banffshire Journal says:-

'The portrait, drawn as it is by a loving hand, is absolutely photographic in its likeness, and the literary criticisms with which the book is pleasantly studded are alike careful and judicious, and with most of them the ordinary reader will cordially agree.'

The Bookman says:-

'This little book is sure to get a welcome.'

The Speaker says:-

'Sense and sensibility are in these pages, as well as knowledge and delicate discrimination.'

The Outlook says:-

'Certainly one of the most charming biographies we have ever come across. The writer has style, sympathy, distinction, and understanding. We were loth to put the book aside. Its one fault is that it is too short.'

The Daily Free Press says:-

'One of the most charming sketches-it is scarcely a biography-of a literary man that could be found has just been published as the latest number of the "Famous Scots Series"-"R. Louis Stevenson," by Miss Black. The excellence of the little book lies in its artless charm, in its loose and easy style, in its author's evident love and delight in her subject.'

Of THOMAS REID, by Professor Campbell Fraser,

The North British Daily Mail says:-

'A model of sympathetic appreciation and of succinct and lucid exposition.'

The Scotsman says:-

'Professor Campbell Fraser's volume on Thomas Reid is one of the most able and valuable of an able and valuable series. He supplies what must be allowed to be a distinct want in our literature, in the shape of a brief, popular, and accessible biography of the founder of the so-called Scottish School of Philosophy, written with notable perspicuity and sympathy by one who has made a special study of the problems that engaged the mind of Reid.'

The Glasgow Herald says:-

'We do not know any volume of the "Famous Scots Series" that deserves or is likely to receive a heartier welcome from the educated public than this life and estimate of Reid by Professor Campbell Fraser. The writer is no amateur, but a past-master in the subject of Scottish philosophy, and it has evidently been a real pleasure to him to expiscate quite a number of new facts regarding the professional and private life of its best representative.'

The Pall Mall Gazette says:-

'The little work is of high excellence-comprehensive in view, dear in exposition, and exemplary in literary style.'

The Saturday Review says:-

'Mr. Campbell Fraser has added to the "Famous Scots Series" an excellent little book on Reid and his philosophy, dealing lucidly with the philosopher's relations with contemporary thinkers and with modern thought.'

Of POLLOK AND AYTOUN, by Rosaline Masson,

The Spectator says:-

'One of the most artistically conceived and gracefully written of the series to which it belongs.'

The Glasgow Herald says:-

'The facts of the two lives are presented by Miss Masson with intelligence and spirit, and the volume will take a good place among the rest of the series.'

Of ADAM SMITH, by Hector C. Macpherson,

The Speaker says:-

'This little book is written with brains and a degree of courage which is in keeping with its convictions. It has vision, too, and that counts for righteousness, if anywhere, in political economy.'

The Echo says:-

'Smith's life is briefly and clearly told, and there is a good deal of independent criticism interspersed amidst the chapters on the philosopher's two principal treatises. Mr. Macpherson's analysis of Smith's economic teaching makes excellent reading.'

The Scots Pictorial says:-

'One of the best of an admirable series.'

Mr. Herbert Spencer says:-

'I have learned much from your sketch of Adam Smith's life and work. It presents the essential facts in a lucid and interesting way. Especially am I glad to see that you have insisted upon the individualistic character of his teaching. It is well that his authority on the side of individualism should be put forward in these days of rampant Socialism, when the great mass of legislative measures extend public agency and restrict private agency; the advocates of such measures being blind to the fact that by small steps they are bringing about a state in which the citizen will have lost all freedom.'

The Glasgow Herald says:-

'A sound and able piece of work, and contains a fair and discerning estimate of Smith in his essential character as the author of the doctrine of Free Trade, and consequently of the modern science of economics.'

Of ANDREW MELVILLE, by William Morison,

The Spectator says:-

'The story is well told, and it takes one through a somewhat obscure period with which it is well to be acquainted. No better guide could be found than Mr. Morison.'

The Speaker says:-

'The great aspects of his career as Principal of Glasgow and then of St. Andrews-it has been said that the European renown of the Scottish Universities began with Melville-are admirably discussed in this virile, and at the same time critical monograph.'

The North British Daily Mail says:-

'Mr. Morison outlines the main facts of Melville's life-work with singular lucidity and point. He displays a full and accurate knowledge of the ecclesiastical history of the period, and his judgments are invariably sound. Altogether the book is one of the best of the series.'

The British Weekly says:-

'Mr. Morison writes with full knowledge of Scottish history, and also with what is equally important, perfect sympathy with the strong men who made it.'

The Academy says:-

'Mr. Morison has told Melville's story with a care for accurate history.'

Of JAMES FREDERICK FERRIER, by E. S. Haldane,

The Scotsman says:-

'Ferrier the man, and even Ferrier the professor, Miss Haldane brings near to us, an attractive and interesting figure.'

The Pall Mall Gazette says:-

'His splendid and transcendental thought and fine eloquence were so inspiring and stimulating, and his personal charm was so fascinating, that a study of the man must engage the sympathies of every student. The author, who is already known for admirable work in the philosophical field, has written an excellent exposition of Ferrier's views.'

Of KING ROBERT THE BRUCE, by Professor Murison,

The Morning Leader says:-

'Professor Murison has given us a book for which not only Scots, but every man who can appreciate a record of great days worthily told will be grateful.'

The Aberdeen Journal says:-

'The story of Bruce is brilliantly told in clear and flexible language, which draws the reader on with the interest of a novel. Professor Murison is a most impartial and thoroughly reliable critic, and may be followed with confidence by all who desire a truthful and unprejudiced picture of this greatest of the Scots.'

The Leeds Mercury says:-

'A worthy, as it is a necessary, addition to an admirable series.'

The Speaker says:-

'He has sifted for himself State records, official papers, old chronicles, and has come to his own conclusions without the aid of modern historians. Therein lies the value of the book: it is a fresh, independent, critical estimate of a man who emancipated Scotland from a thraldom which was almost worse than death. Bruce's career from first to last is described in these pages with uncompromised fidelity, and no attempt is made to gloss over the faults of a masterful nature.'

The Morning Leader says:-

'Professor Murison has given us a book for which not only Scots, but every man who can appreciate a record of great days worthily told, will be grateful.'

Of JAMES HOGG, THE ETTRICK SHEPHERD, by Sir George Douglas,

The Scotsman says:-

'Sir George Douglas has contributed a gracefully written and well-knit biography of the Ettrick Shepherd to the "Famous Scots" Series. It follows in a spirit of kindly criticism the steps of Hogg through the shadow and sunshine, the failures and successes of his career, from the hillsides of Yarrow and Ettrick to the more slippery places of the world of literature, and back again to the solitude of the forest; and it gives us judicious and sympathetic appreciations of his work in prose and in verse, much of it already fallen into unmerited neglect.'

The New Age says:-

'A capital biography-full, careful, discriminating, and sympathetic.'

The Daily News says:-

'The story of James Hogg's manly, honourable battle with poverty, and of his literary achievement, is excellently told by Sir George Douglas.'

The Expository Times says:-

'The book is accurate, and must have cost research, but it is written in a pleasant gossipy manner, quite as if Hogg had flung the flavour of Hogg's writings over his biographer.'

Saint Andrew says:-

'We have no hesitation in saying that this valuable and interesting volume will be welcomed by the Scots people as heartily as any that have preceded it.'

Of THOMAS CAMPBELL, by J. Cuthbert Hadden,

The Scotsman says:-

'A very useful, compact, well-digested, and well-written account of Campbell's career and literary labours.'

Transcriber's Note

Irregular or archaic spelling and irregular hyphenation are retained. Minor changes to punctuation, in the index and in section headings, have been made without comment.

Footnotes have been moved to the end of the book.

In the Daily Chronicle's review of SIR JAMES YOUNG SIMPSON, by Eve Blantyre Simpson, "superflous" has been changed to "superfluous".