Pope's, his youthful fancy was captivated by Statius, and his first performance was a commentary on the ‘Thebaid,’ composed at the age of nineteen. The jesuits may well have desired to enlist so promising a recruit in their order; but the usual story that his father carried him off to England to avoid their persecutions is rendered doubtful by the different account of the motive of his visit assigned by himself in one of his poems. The accession of a Scottish king to the English throne would seem quite sufficient inducement to draw a gifted and enterprising young Scotsman to London; at the same time his antipathy to the jesuits, from whatever cause it may have arisen, was unquestionably very genuine, and found vent in his next work. The first part of the ‘Satyricon,’ published under the name of Euphormio Lusininus, is said to have appeared in London in 1603, but no copy of the edition has ever been found. A second edition was printed at Paris in 1605. Barclay's stay in England was but short; he repaired first to Angers, and in 1605 to Paris, where he married Louise Debonnaire, daughter of an army paymaster, and herself a Latin scholar and poetess. The married pair removed in 1606 to London, where, in the same year, Barclay published his Latin poems under the title of ‘Sylvæ,’ but the second part of the ‘Satyricon’ was published at Paris in 1607, an edition entirely unknown until recently brought to light by M. Jules Dukas. Barclay continued to reside in London for nearly ten years, enjoying, as the statement of his friend Thorie and the internal evidence of his works attest, the favour of James I as a countryman and a scholar; but the assertions of some of his biographers fail to convince us that he was entrusted with state secrets or employed in foreign missions. The obloquy occasioned by the attacks made in the ‘Satyricon’ on the jesuits and the Duke of Lorraine compelled him in 1611 to vindicate himself by the publication of an ‘Apologia,’ usually but improperly regarded as a third part of the work. This has been usually stated to have been designed as a reply to a particular attack of which the author has remained unknown, but M. Dukas demonstrates that this latter cannot have been written before 1616 or 1617. In 1608 Barclay lost his father, and in 1609 he edited the latter's posthumous treatise, ‘De Potestate Papæ,’ a work boldly attacking the usurpations of the mediæval popes, which involved him in a controversy with Bellarmine. By other jesuit adversaries he was accused of having dissembled or forsaken his religion to gratify James I, a charge which could have been easily established if it had been well founded. In 1614 he published the ‘Icon Animorum,’ generally reckoned as the fourth part of the ‘Satyricon,’ an animated and accurate sketch of the character of the chief European nations. In 1616 he quitted England for Rome, a step imputed by himself to penitence for having published and defended the errors of his father on the extent of the papal authority; but which the internal evidence of his Latin poems shows to have been rather occasioned by the disappointment of his hopes of reward and advancement at the English court. Though his works continued to be prohibited at Rome, he was pensioned by Paul V and well received by his old antagonist Bellarmine; he repaid their protection, ‘meliore voluntate quam successu,’ says one of his biographers, by a controversial work against protestantism, the ‘Parænesis ad Sectarios,’ printed at Cologne in 1617. It was probably discovered that theology was not his forte; at all events, his services were not again put into requisition, and he spent his last years in retirement, indulging the innate Scottish taste for gardening by cultivating tulips, and his special literary gift by the composition of his masterpiece, the ‘Argenis.’ According to a manuscript note in a copy belonging to M. Dukas, founded on information derived from Barclay's son, this memorable work was completed on 28 July 1621; on 1 Aug. the author was stricken with a violent fever, and he expired on the 15th. Ralph Thorie, in his anonymous elegy on Barclay's death (London, 1621), more than insinuates that he was poisoned, and the suddenness of his decease is certainly suspicious. His romance was printed the same year at Paris, under the supervision of his friend Peirescius, whose letters to him remain unedited in the public library at Carpentras. Barclay, by his own direction, was interred in the church of St. Onofrio, which also holds the remains of Tasso. A monument erected to him in another church was subsequently removed, either from the revival of suspicions respecting his orthodoxy; or, according to another account, from his widow's displeasure at a copy having been made for Cardinal Barberini as a monument to a tutor in his own family. Barclay left a son, who became an abbé. His widow returned to France, and died at Orleans in 1652.
Barclay is a writer of the highest merit, who has adapted the style of Petronius, elevated by the assiduous study of more dignified models, with signal success to the requirements of his own day. His ‘Satyricon’ shows how completely at an early age he had appropriated the fascinating elegance of Petronius, while good taste or good morals kept his
