I have not found leisure to finish the second book of my poem De Sphera, and
therefore I have not made a transcript of the first. As soon as the former are
completed I shall transmit them to you. Salute in my name all our friends at
Orleans, and such others as it may be convenient. Farewell. Edinburgh, July
the twenty-fourth, 1536." The work, of course, met with his friend's approbation, and was printed in Paris by Robert Stephens in 1567, 12mo.
We have already noticed that the poem De Sphera was never completed.
From the above letter it appears that it was Buchanan's intention to return to
it when he should have finished some others that were in a greater state of
forwardness, and did not require such a full command of his time as a work of
greater magnitude. Circumstances, however, soon put a period to these peaceful and pleasing 1 pursuits.
The marriage of Mary and Darnley, the murders of Rizzio and Darnley, the union between the Queen and Bothwell, the flight of the latter, Mary's surrender to the confederated lords, her imprisonment in Lochleven castle, and her escape from it, the defeat of her army at Langside, and her escape into England, are the events best known of any in Scottish history, and it is needless here to enlarge upon them. When Elizabeth thought fit to appoint commissioner, and call witnesses from Scotland for the purpose of substantiating the charges upon which Mary had been expelled from the throne, the main burden of the proof was devolved upon Buchanan, who had accepted favours from the Queen, indeed, but did not on that account either decline the task of becoming her accuser, or perform it with the less severity. He accordingly accompanied the Regent Murray into England upon that occasion, having composed in Latin a Detection of Mary's actions, which was laid before the commissioners at Westminster, and was afterwards most industriously circulated by the English court. To the same pen has also been ascribed the Actio contra Mariam Scotorum Reginam, a coarse and scurrilous invective, which was printed in England along with the Detection, but of which no man capable of reading Buchanan's works will believe that he ever composed one line. "The Detection," says an eminent historian, "is a concise historical deduction of facts, a rapid narrative written with that chaste and classical precision of thought and language by which each sentence acquires an appropriate idea distinct from the preceding, neither anticipated, repeated, nor intermixed with others ; and the style is so strictly historical that the work is incorporated in Buchanan's history almost without alteration. But the Action against Mary is a dull declamation and a malignant invective, written in professed imitation of the ancient orators, whom Buchanan has never imitated, without arrangement of parts, coherence, or a regular train of ideas, and without a single passage which Buchanan in his history has deigned to transcribe." The assassination of the Regent Murray soon after his return from England, threw the nation into a still deeper ferment, and Buchanan, strongly suspicious of the selfish policy of the Hamiltons, which he regarded as the principal source of the calamities that now afflicted the nation, addressed "Ane admonition direct to the true lordis maintainirs of the kingis graces authorite," in which he earnestly adjured them to protect the young king and the children of the late regent from the perils that seemed to impend over them. The same year he composed a satirical delineation of the character of the secretary Lethington, entitled, Chameleon, which, through the vigilance of the secretary, was prevented from being published at the time. A copy, however, was preserved among the Cotton MSS. dated 1570, and it was printed at London, in 1710, in the Miscellanea Scotica. It has been often reprinted since. These two pieces appear to be all that he ever composed in his vernacular tongue, and they are of such excellence as to make it matter of regret that he did not turn his attention
