The parties become incapable of coming to an agreement; the more they meet the more they wrangle, and the more-bitter becomes the strife. In such a case, a court of conciliation would have little difficulty in settling the dispute. The spread of the conflagration would be arrested, and a bitter and lasting alienation between masters and men prevented.

The gradual growth of courts of conciliation, or of committees of arbitration, would greatly lessen the necessity for the action of trades-unions. These might continue to exist for a time, but as disputes would be otherwise disposed of, their economic function might gradually cease and determine.

A third proposed method of obviating the evils now so prevalent is that of co-operation. Under this general term, workmen might either carry on business together, being masters and operatives in one; or the workmen might have an interest in the profits of the business, either as shareholders of its capital, or as recipients of a stated bonus, where the business was profitable, in addition to their wages. The success of the plan of a bonus out of profits has been so far evinced in the case of the Methley Collieries, and in other instances where it has been tried. But a much wider induction of facts is needed to show whether this plan could be worked extensively in practice. The inquiries of the Commission might very profitably be directed to this important question.

It is remarkable that the methods of conciliation and cooperation find more favour among foreign workmen than among those of Britain. At the International Congress of Geneva this was apparent; the Continental delegates inclining to the more peaceful methods of solving the problem of capital and labour; while the British were more disposed to rely on combination.

Lastly, we are not to forget, among the means of putting an end to the present disastrous strife, the promotion of a spirit of sympathy and mutual regard. Nothing is more apparent in the history of this subject, than that this spirit, where it has existed, has been the means of either preventing strifes altogether, or of causing them to be speedily adjusted. Employers who have shown a friendly interest in the welfare of their men, and who have treated them with kindly consideration, have not had much difficulty in settling wages or other points in dispute, except when their people have been overruled by a distant union-executive. Such interference of unions has given rise to the most distressing results. Nothing can be more painful than the sight of a workshop driven into war with a kind-hearted and considerate employer by the indiscriminate commands of a union, whose motto seems to be,

'Tros Tyriusque mihi nullo discrimine agetur.'

The statement of Sir Charles Fox at a recent meeting we thoroughly indorse :

'It had fallen to his lot to have the management of large numbers of working people, and his experience went to prove that if they were dealt with as Christian and rational beings, and not as cold chisels, to be laid aside when done with, the best feeling could prevail between employers and employed. At one time he had 12,000 men to superintend, and though they had had several strikes, they always came to terms, because he said to them, "Send a few men to have a talk with me," and thus an amicable arrangement had always been arrived at.'

It has been remarked, that strikes are seldom got up by the old hands that have been long in the employment of a master, but by comparative strangers, who seem to have a vocation for wandering hither and thither, and exciting disaffection and revolt. Nothing would be more to be regretted, in connexion with the present agitation, than that it should have the effect of discouraging kindly employers in their philanthropic and Christian efforts to promote the good of their workmen, or that it should fill the hearts of workmen with bitter jealousy and dislike towards masters really anxious, if they knew how, to do their duty.

In writing, on the 16th July last, to the Secretary of the London Trades' Council, Lord St. Leonards remarked:-'The operatives as well as the masters cannot lose sight of the alarm which exists in the public mind at the vast spread, throughout the land, of strikes and lock-outs.' Would it not be well for both parties now to proclaim a truce, and endeavour to devise a method of settling their differences worthy of the most civilized and the most Christian country of Europe?

ART. II.-1. Georgii Buchanani, Scoti, Poetarum sui seculi facile Principis, Opera Omnia, ad optimorum codicum fidem summo studio recognita et castigata. Curante THOMA RUDDIMANNO, A.M. Edinburgh, 1715.

2. Memoirs of the Life and Writings of George Buchanan. By DAVID IRVING, LL.D. Second Edition. Edinburgh, 1817.

THE fate of those men of genius who in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries employed the Latin language as their instrument for acting upon the intellect of Europe, has been something altogether peculiar, and to which no parallel can be found in the history of literature. The old classic writers still live. The old modern writers still live. There are students of Horace and Cicero; there are students of Chaucer and Montaigne. But to be at once a classic neglected by scholars, and a modern neglected by readers for amusement, is a destiny of curious hardness; and it is the destiny of the great men, one of whom we have chosen for our subject on this occasion. Nobody is entitled to say that they have become obsolete for want of those literary qualities, the want of which, in a general way, not unnaturally consigns the medieval chroniclers to lasting obscurity. On the contrary, they were in constant familiarity with literatures of which the chroniclers had heard only a faint echo; and they had learned to develop their powers in every direction which has since been taken by the European intellect. The mere talents of Erasmus were certainly not inferior to those of Voltaire. There is as good, rich, sly, sarcastic portraiture of monkery in the Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum as in Rabelais. The Scaligerana has not less sense and wit than the recorded Table-Talk of Walpole or Rogers. Yet the names of Erasmus, Von Hütten, Joseph Scaliger, or our own Buchanan, resemble nothing so much as the V.R.'s or other royal initials, the day after an illumination. They may still be made out on the walls; but the light has gone from them; and the casual passer-by perhaps wonders why they have not been taken down before. The better these memorable writers did their work, the worse it has proved for them. They were classics in the interest of the modern world, and moderns in the interest of the classical world. They spent their lives in uniting the two; and now they cannot be said to have a place in either. Modern Europe has as little grateful recollection of them as a pair of young lovers-made one-has of the parson without whom their union could not have taken place.

We are unwilling to believe that Scotland has been more

ungrateful to George Buchanan than other countries to their heroes of the same class. The edition of his works by Ruddiman is a literary monument as honourable as the edition of Erasmus by Le Clerc. Something was done for his biography by George Chalmers; and it was written by Dr. Irving with much good sense, and much solid research. His Latin version of the Psalms was long used in our schools; and his portrait adorns the cover of the most famous of our periodicals. Nevertheless, what Father Prout said is very true: we are more apt to glory in his reputation than to read his works. And, perhaps, we hardly appreciate the immense importance of that reputation to our literary dignity in Europe. When all is said and done, we Scots have at best produced three writers of European influence and celebrity; George Buchanan in the sixteenth, David Hume in the eighteenth, and Walter Scott in the nineteenth century. This calculation involves no disrespect to the memory of Burns or Adam Smith, because Burns was hampered by the limitations of his culture, his subjects, and his language; and Smith devoted himself mainly to one study, connected only with one side of human affairs, and has not even yet penetrated with complete success the Continental mind and Continental legislation. Now, of the three, the three who keep the citadel of our fame for us, Buchanan was the earliest. The Scottish genius had brairded before his day, but had never ripened into grain to be eaten as bread. From many passages in Erasmus, it is clear that we were only beginners in letters before Buchanan's time. He it was who made us famous from the Vistula to the Tagus, and gave us a national name in literature by his pen, as Bruce had given us a national name in politics by his sword. Of such a man, every Scot ought to have something like a familiar image in his mind; and every Scot ought to know by what labours, and kind of labours, his fame was achieved.

It is not known to which of the races making up our nationality the ancestors of Buchanan belonged. The name in itself proves nothing, because it was taken from the lands which they gained, and lands were gained not by Celts only, but by Norwegians, Angles, Saxons, and Normans. It is certain, however, that he was a cadet of the Buchanans of that Ilk, and came of a family which he has himself described as magis vetusta quam opulenta. Like every Scotsman of that age, Knox included, he had a vein of feudalism in him; and the late Mr. Joseph Robertson well pointed out that as 'a Lennox man' hostile to the Hamiltons, he showed his breed and his associations in his politics. He was born about the beginning of February 1506, in a humble house called the Moss, in the parish of Killearn,

Stirlingshire; being the third son of Thomas Buchanan (second
son of Thomas Buchanan of Drummakill) by Agnes Heriot,
daughter of Heriot of Trabroun in the Eastern Lowlands. The
family fortunes were at a low ebb; and no peasant's son could
well have had a harder fight of it than this poor scion of an old
Dumbartonshire house from the neighbourhood of Loch Lomond.
His father was cut off early by the stone. His grandfather,
who survived, was a bankrupt. And the family, of five sons
and three daughters, were painfully brought up by their mother,
who engaged in farming, and provided for them as best she
could, in the old rugged frugal Scotch way. George was a
clever lad, and showed some promise at the local schools, though
he ought to have told us to which of them he was sent.
was seven years old when FLODDEN was fought, quite old
enough to feel a shudder of sympathy with the thrill of anguish
that the bloody news sent through Scotland. Probably there
were tears in the modest household when that news came.
we all know how-

'Far on the left, unseen the while,
Stanley broke Lennox and Argyle,
Though there the Western mountaineer
Rushed with bare bosom on the spear.'

He

For

And districts and names were so linked together in those days, that a disaster pierced to the hearts of a hundred families, and plunged them in a common grief.

The promise which George Buchanan showed in the scholis patriis, whichever they were, already referred to, induced his uncle, James Heriot, to send' him to school in Paris in 1520. Here we have one fruit of the old French alliance, and a very pleasant one. Buchanan worked hard at Latin. But within two years his kind uncle died; want and sickness pressed together upon him, and he was forced to return home. He gave a year to the care of his health; and in the winter of 1523 served a campaign on the Borders with the Duke of Albany, the Regent, who had come over with a body of French auxiliaries to make war on the English. The great question whether Scotland, now passing from the medieval into the modern life, was to develop under Continental or English influences, was fitfully settling itself, sometimes in sharp paroxysms, sometimes in slow struggles. It was to be Buchanan's destiny to arrive through a Continental experience, and yet liking the Continent, at English politics. His immediate motive now was to see a little of war as a part of education. Long afterwards, he expressed his opinion that there was much more affinity between the literary and the military intellect than was vulgarly sup

VOL. XLVI.--NO. XCI.

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