of Buchanan. And he soon had an oppor-. neophytes how to impose upon and enjoy tunity of turning the Somnium, a compara- world. It may suffice to say that debauchtively light and playful satire, into a satire ery and fraud are far from being the worst of which neither Juvenal nor Swift would of them, and that the Scotch religious of be ashamed. He had been presented to that day had some curious points of resemJames the Fifth, and when his connexion blance to the pagans of Juvenal's time. with Lord Cassilis ceased, James made him There is one story introduced, and told with tutor to James Stewart, his natural son by great spirit and pictorial power, which may Elizabeth Shaw of the Sauchie family.* A have belonged to a later period of Buchanan's similar duty had been discharged by Eras- experience, and have been added by him to mus for a natural son of James the Fourth, the finally-revised edition which he dedicated who fell with his father at Flodden. While to the Earl of Murray in 1564. A brother Buchanan was engaged upon it, in 1537, of the order, he relates, embarked on the James brought over from France his young Garonne for Bordeaux with a woman whom bride Magdalen, whose death in less than he had seduced, and who was far gone in two months after her arrival, caused such her pregnancy. The wretched creature fell general sorrow in Scotland, that Buchanan into labour on the way, and her scoundrelly says it gave the first occasion to the use of companion deserted her at the first landingmourning in that country. Soon after her place, and left her with her child to the pity death, there was a talk of a conspiracy or contempt of the gazing crowd. An against the King, and James, who thought admirable touch of humour follows the narthe Franciscans had acted insincerely about rative: I myself,' exclaims the old friar it, called Buchanan to him one day at Court, who tells the story, young and strong as I and asked him to write a poem against them. then was, could hardly keep down the murBuchanan, feeling that this was a task which it murs and voices of the people; sturdily was dangerous either to refuse or to perform, though I swore that the criminal was a folbrought a half-harmless production, which he lower of Luther, concealing himself under hoped would pass as a compromise; but the the name of our holy sect!" There is here King wanted something sharp and pointed, some of that unctuous irony, at once rich acre et aculeatum. The result was the Fran- with fun and bitter with scorn, the great ciscanus, which now opens the second part of masters of which are Juvenal in the ancient, the second volume of Ruddiman's edition. and Swift in the modern world. It is the It is a long satirical poem in sonorous natural satire of strong and serious, as dishexameters, occupying seventeen folio pages. tinct from the pleasantry of light and brilHe sets out by warning a young fellow liant natures; and Buchanan, a good deal who had some thoughts of becoming a of whose work in the world was done by Franciscan what kind of men they were. In satire, belongs, as a satirist, to the school of the first place, the order is recruited, he says, Juvenal and Swift, Dryden and Churchill, from the ranks of those born to nothing, rather than of Aristophanes, Horace, Erasand who take up sanctity as livelihood; mus, or Voltaire. He had a distinct poetiwho have a harsh stepmother, perhaps, or a cal vein, and could relish love, and beauty, hard father; who don't like school and and external nature. But this was a vein study, from their stupidity, and whom lazi- in the flint of a good hard solid intelligence, ness and feebleness make unfit for the oar primarily strong in its sagacity and its reasand the plough. Then, there are the fanati- oning powers, and in harmony, accordingly, cal candidates and the greedy ones, who hope with a disposition from which neither wit to prey on the superstition of the vulgar; nor poetry banished a certain austerity that and a darker school of hypocrites, who look was natural to it. And, indeed, the austo the grey garb, the cord, and the cowl as terity would not have been wonderful if disguises favourable to a life of secret crime. there had been nothing else to account for What those crimes were Buchanan tells us it but the complexion of George Buchanan's with the most pungent frankness, in a part fortunes. A pauper gentleman from a counof the poem where he ironically introduces try steeped in aristocratic sentiment, a fama veteran of the society teaching his young ished student, a suffering schoolmaster, a hunted Reformer,-these are not the parts in the drama of life which are favourable to the continuous good humour of the perfor mer. But the severity of Buchanan's satire was wholesome. And in estimating its power, let us not forget, what the very excellence of his Latinity constantly tends to make us forget, that he was always—unlike * One of the rare slips of the accurate Ruddiman was his confounding this James Stewart with the celebrated Regent, a mistake all the stranger, because, in dedicating the Franciscanus to the Regent thirty years afterwards, Buchanan tells him that he was appointed by the King to educate his son, which would have been a ridiculous piece of information to the son himself. the past Juvenal and the Swift to comewriting in a language which was not his own. The swing and freedom of the hexameters of the Franciscanus was not the special acquirement of a man who had studied one metre. All metres came alike to him, and all varieties of prose, narrative, dialogue, and oratory. He was rather a Scotticized Roman than a Romanized Scot; or we may say that, like the founders of Rome in the old Legend, he had the Roman wolf for his foster-mother, and absorbed her milk into his whole being. James the Fifth probably enjoyed the Franciscanus. He had the Stewarts' parts, though his education had been neglected, as Buchanan in his History remarks; and he was not without a relish for attacks on the abuses of the Church and the clergy. In those very years, he had been present at the open-air performance of the satirical play of good Sir David Lindsay,-to our taste, still the most freshly readable of our old poets, a man of keen sense and gay sprightly humour, the half-developed Aristophanes of an uncultivated age. Nay, there were some hopes that his marriage with Magdalen, who was niece of the Queen of Navarre, would be favorable to the cause of the Reformation in Scotland. But Magdalen was laid, in her girlhood, in the Abbey of Holyrood; and the marriage-torches of his nuptials next year with Mary of Guise lighted the piles of many martyrs. The year after that, early in 1539, Buchanan was made prisoner. The King failed to protect the man who had provoked the bigots at his own request; and Buchanan was even told by friends at the Court that his life was to be sold to Cardinal Beaton for money. He made his escape, when his guards were asleep, through his bedroom-window, and fled to London;* not without hazard, on the road, from the thieves on the Borders, and the plague in the North of England. A Sir John Rainsford, whose memory he honoured afterwards with grateful lines,—it is significant that we should find him grateful to persons whom we know to have befriended him,-did him great services at this time; and some verses addressed to Thomas Cromwell, and to King Henry, show that he was anxious to find friends, and perhaps a settlement, in London. We should like to be sure that he visited the tomb of his predecessor in Scottish scholarship, Bishop Douglas, who is honourably mentioned in his History, and * Chalmers said that he was imprisoned in the Castle of St. Andrews, quoting, in proof of it, a a passage in which Brantôme said the same thing of Queen Mary!-(See Irving, note, p. 23.) had been buried in the Church of the Savoy seventeen years before. But his stay on the banks of the Thames was short. The King was burning, with rigid impartiality, those who insisted on believing in the Pope's authority, and those who insisted on disbelieving the Pope's religion. So, the uncertainty of public affairs, the hopelessness of his private affairs, and, as he tells us, the summa humanitas of the French whom he always liked, took him once more over to Paris. There he had the misfortune to find his enemy, Cardinal Beaton, acting as ambassador; so he accepted an engagement from Andrew Govea, a learned Portuguese, who had been for some time head of the College of Guienne, and set off for Bordeaux. Scotland has always been famous for good Latin and good claret; and that her greatest scholar should have taught Latin in the capital of the claret-country, has a historical fitness about it which we rather like. It was still the eventful year 1539 when he settled there; for Charles the Fifth visited the city, in which he held a festival of the Order of the Golden Fleece, and Buchanan addressed a poem to him, in December. Buchanan wrote little poems on several occasions of public interest, which spread abroad, and diffused his reputation, though they were not collected and published, in the modern sense, till after years. Writers publish books now in order to become known; they published books then because they were known. The world of letters of Europe formed a European commonwealth or confederation, with the Latin as its common language. Englishmen, Scots, French, Poles, Portuguese, moved to and fro, serving in each others' universities from the mountains of Scotland to the vineyards of Aquitaine; and this migratory life and free international communication gave superior men a celebrity which was in a certain degree independent of the issue of books. Buchanan remained at Bordeaux, teaching Latin in the College of Guienne, for three years. It was an interesting period of his life, though not free from anxiety, inasmuch as Cardinal Beaton sent letters urging the Achbishop of Bordeaux to arrest him; and the Franciscans, as usual, were criminally busy scheming how to do him an injury. But it was the fortune of this illustrious man, and an admirable sign of the affectionate respect which he inspired, to make friends wherever he went. At Bordeaux, he had friends who staved off the of James the Fifth, in 1542; and a plague danger from the Archbishop till the death raging in Aquitaine diverted the attention of his persecutors. Meanwhile, he pursued At Bordeaux, also, Buchanan translated the Medea and Alcestis of Euripides, versions used so lately as the other day by Monk. And to Bordeaux belongs the charming Maia Calendæ, for he speaks there of the grape which grows on the sandy soil of Gascony: 'Nec tenebris claudat generosum cella Lyæum, Quem dat arenoso Vasconis uva solo.' The poem is full of all images of love, and joy, and southern merry-making; and, like many a quaint passage in Knox's History, and many a brilliant hit in Beza's epigrams, is instructive as giving us the genial side of those great sixteenth-century reformers, whom wretched modern sentimentalists scarcely ever name without a shudder. Buchanan had heard the chimes at midnight, and the laugh of Neæra in the corner; and knew well the flavour of Gascon wine, and talked well over it. He was earnest and laborious and proud; but also hilarious One his regular duties, and his nobler literary labours, with his usual energy and success. One young gentleman, sent at a very early age to the College, had him for a domestic preceptor there, and has carried his name to many a circle where it might not otherwise have penetrated. This was the great humorist, and moralist, whom Europe appreciates, now, perhaps, better than it ever did,-Michel de Montaigne. In his famous addressed to Madame Diane de Foix, essay 'De l'Institution des Enfants' (Essais, liv. i. chap. 25), Montaigne speaks of him as Georges Buchanan, ce grand poëte escossois,' and says that he was one of his 'precepteurs domestiques.' They met in after years, Montaigne goes on to tell, when Buchanan had charge of the young Comte de Brissac, and Buchanan declared that he meant to write on education, and take that of his old pupil as a model. Montaigne had learned Latin in his infancy by hearing nothing else spoken, and used to chatter it so freely as a youngster, that Buchanan and and humane. We sometimes think that he Muretus, he adds, were afraid to accost him. was very fairly typified by his coat-of-arms,What a pleasant picture that of such a a lion rampant holding a human heart in its meeting between the grave and storm-tossed, dexter paw. He was leonine, but he had but brilliant and high-spirited Scot, and the kindly affections of nature too. the bright-witted, lively French boy, before great man whom he came to know during whom a life of such quiet happy sunshine his stay in Gascony evidently found him was slowly opening! When he grew a little older Montaigne used, as he likewise him so, Julius Caesar Scaliger. Scaliger, now self informs us, to play parts in the Latin getting well on in middle life, was settled as dramas which Buchanan wrote to be acted and others used to go and visit him in the a physician at Agen, and to Agen, Buchanan in the College. These dramas are Jepthes vintage-time. He forgot even his gout,— and Baptistes; the first based on the story records his son, the famous Joseph,-when of Jeptha's vow in Judges, the second on he had such men to talk with him about letthe fate of John the Baptist. They are ters: the literary man' without literature, written, not indeed with much tragic tender- being still (happily) in the womb of time. ness, but with an elevated vigour, and in And Buchanan enjoyed Scaliger as much diction of great purity and elegance. The as Scaliger enjoyed Buchanan. It once Baptistes is particularly interesting; be happened that our George was detained cause it is easy to see that in drawing a when his friend expected him, and he excruel Pharisee, Buchanan is thinking of not less cruel Papists; while the stern abhor-pressed his feelings in some pleasant lines, which conclude as follows: rence which he shows of tyranny in his whole presentation of Herod, is the natural forerunner of the De Jure Regni apud Scotos and the Rerum Scoticarum Historia of future years. His Protestantism was steadily strengthening itself; and he had drawn from the purest founts of classical antiquity a love of freedom never more necessary to Europe than just at that time, when the feudal checks on despotism were growing weak, and nothing had yet risen to take their place. In his double capacity of Scottish gentleman and classical scholar, George detested despotism; and we shall see presently that he is one of the undoubted founders of the modern constitutionalism of Europe. Quamvis laboris omnia ingratissimi Magis molesta est cæteris molestiis Joseph Scaliger, the greater son' of Julius, as many have thought him, must have been born while Buchanan was in the province, and may possibly have been exhibited to him on one of his visits, as the ẞpédos or infans. He inherited his father's admiration for Buchanan, and perhaps his friendship for him. He certainly tells us, in that *Buch. Epig. i. 49 (Op. ed. Rudd. ii. 78). + In 1540. eminently curious book of table-talk, the Scaligerana, that he was in Edinburgh soon after the murder of Rizzio (A. D. 1566); and it is hard to conjecture why he should have visited Scotland, without counting a wish to see Buchanan amongst his chief probable motives. Strange to say, this journey of the younger Scaliger to the North has failed to attract the attention of any of Buchanan's biographers. Buchanan mentions him with honour in his History; and he celebrated Buchanan in an epitaph, the last couplet of which ranks with the most masterly things that we know : 'Imperii fuerat Romani Scotia limes, Romani eloquii Scotia finis erit.' This memorable residence at Bordeaux lasted, as we have said, for three years. With an indifference to chronological detail, of which Bayle complains, Buchanan passed over in his autobiography the five years which followed, during which he visited Toulouse, and was a regent of the College of Cardinal Le Moine, in Paris. The scholars of that age loved to remember how Buchanan, Turnebus, and Muretus all taught in this College at the same time; and a Scot may assert, without fear of being convicted of patriotic exaggeration, that Buchanan was the greatest of the illustrious triad. As a scholar merely, he was a match for any man; but the greatness of many scholars ended where his had still a new world before it. He was not only a critic, philologer, or Latin stylist, but a man of genius, using the accomplishments which these titles imply as the tools of a fine intellect. The orations of Muretus, for instance, are still worth reading by anybody who cares to see with what easy grace a dead language may be used by a man of parts and scholarship. But that exhausts their praise; for there is no mind at bottom worth the skill employed in the superficial expression. The classicism of Muretus is a Roman mask, but a mask only. The classicism of Buchanan is a Roman face, with a strong living brain behind it. He was now turned forty, and the gout had begun to give him sharp hints of what was in preparation for his old age. A wanderer from his boyhood, he was to be a wanderer still, and in 1547, he set off with his friend Andrew Govea to Portugal, the king of which country, John the Third, had founded a university at Coimbra, which he was anxious to stock with sound and eminent professors. Of the men selected, several were Buchanan's friends. Portugal seemed a quiet corner to retreat to, at a time when the whole of the rest of the Continent was threatened with war. And the whole prospect seemed so tempting, that he persuaded his brother Patrick to join the group." * But soon after they all settled down in their new land Andrew Govea died. His powerful influence withdrawn, the Portuguse bigots and heresy-hunters began to vex the little colony of scholars. Three of them were confined, after much outrageous insult, in the dungeons of the Inquisition. Buchanan himself was handled with peculiar severity. He was a foreigner, and without patrons. He had written a satire against the Franciscans, which his. persecutors did not detest the less, because none of them had seen a copy of it; and because Buchanan had taken the precaution to explain all about it to King John before he entered the country. He had eaten flesh in Lent, and the whole Peninsula did the same. He had made occasional jokes at monks; and was reported to have said in conversation, that St. Augustine seemed to him to lean towards a view of the Eucharist condemned by the Church of Rome. All this was quite enough to ruin him in the eyes of a Portuguese religious rabble. But he was a man of European distinction; so the authorities, after teasing him for half a year, shut him up in a monastery that the monks might instruct' him! were civil enough, but very ignorant, Buchanan informs us. Yet will his stay within their walls be remembered long after the last monk in Portugal has become an honest ploughman or cobbler; for in that Portuguese monastery Buchanan began his immortal version of the Psalms, and executed many of them. Surely it would be difficult to find a more dramatic position even in that, the heroic period, as it may be truly called, of modern literary history! Here was a Scot from the Lennox,-born on the river Blane, amidst the lochs and mountains of the north,-imprisoned among lemoncomplexioned monks under the sun of Lusitania, and while nominally undergoing their illiterate teaching, beguiling the hours by founding a great classical religious work. But there is something more than dramatic in the picture of Buchanan translating the Psalms in a Portuguese cell. His great nature had known sorrow, and was feeling it now, like the royal Psalmist himself; and if he cried to his Lord in a language which was not that he had learned from his mother, the intellectual labour did not, we may feel The monks celebrated him with Catullian tenderness.-Epig. * Pate was cut off prematurely and his brother 2.23 (Op. ed. Rudd. ii. 84). sure, altogether deaden the spiritual pain. The translation, thus viewed, has a special moral interest; and the fact that such were Buchanan's occupations, prepares us for finding him by and by one of the founders of modern Protestant Scotland, along with the Regent Murray and Knox. Buchanan's version of the Psalms is indeed, in many respects, a translation standing alone in the history of literature. It is not a translation of a mere work of art, however illustrious, but of a work which the nations have agreed to receive as inspired by more than human wisdom, and expressed with more than human beauty. It is not a translation into the language of the readers to whom it is addressed, but into a language in no way coloured by the faith embodied in the original, and all the associations of which are different from and often 'Dum procul a patria mosti Babylonis in oris, Siccine divinos Babylon irrideat hymnos? Os mihi destituat vox, arescente palato, Hæreat ad fauces aspera lingua meas: nas: Et rerum instabiles experiere vices. incongruous with, that faith. Buchanan was to render the deep Semitic spiritualism of the prophet monarch into a Pagan tongue; into the speech of Epicurean procurators of Judea, and Roman men of the world, whose poetry was half a result of cultivation; into metres made famous by the love-songs of Eolian girls, and the warsongs of Eolian demagogues; the idylls of Sicilians at the court of the Ptolemies, and of their graceful imitators in the Rome of the Emperors; the epics of artificial poets; and the satirical and familiar pieces of debauched heathen wits. This was no common task, but luckily it fell into the hands of no common man. Buchanan knew that his version must be classical; there is no standard of Latin but that which the classical writers supply. So he set himself to build a classical temple in honour of the true God; and instead of the hewn stone, and the cedars of Lebanon, and the gold, and the lily-work, and the pomegranates of the temple at Jerusalem, he provided the marble, and the oak, and the olive-wood, and the silver from Laurion, and the subtle, graceful carvings of Greece and Italy. For every rose of Sharon, he did his best to provide a rose of Pæstum. And the result is a work unequal in parts, too closely recalling, sometimes, its classical models; but grave, chaste, noble, skilful, and occasionally of a beauty which defies all rivalry; which has the Syrian depth of feeling with the European charm of form, and in which you seem to hear the old sad Hebrew soul breathing itself through the strings of an Italian lute. Lest the reader should fancy that our reverence for Buchanan has carried us too far, we transcribe what is perhaps the gem of the whole work, the 'By the Rivers | He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, And herb for the service of man: This may be studied as a model of such compositions. There is thorough power, yet perfect ease; a quiet finished classical tone throughout, but no patchwork, no mosaic, no centoism. His Muse does not carry the classic rose in her bosom as something she has plucked; but it is on her cheek, it comes from the classic health in her blood. Anybody who wishes to see the difference between a modern man of genius writing in Latin, and an accomplished modern gentleman who can write Latin verses, should turn to the Anthologia Oxoniensis, and compare this delightful performance with the translation of the same psalm by Lord Grenville. of Babylon,' the 137th Psalm : Another poem in Buchanan's version which stands very high, is the 104th'Bless the Lord, O my soul.' There is a fine roll of genial vigour in the passage we are about to quote. The reader may like to compare it with the version used in our churches, to which we give precedence, accordingly : 'He watereth the hills from his chambers: The earth is satisfied with the fruit of thy works. |