In 1571 Buchanan was appointed preceptor to the young king, who was only four years of age. The aged tutor tried to make his royal pupil a scholar; but his erudition, poured in merciless profusion into a weak mind, at once degenerated into pedantry. In his delicate task he was assisted by Patrick Young and the abbots of Cambuskenneth and Dryburgh, cadets of the noble house of Marr. There was some distinction between the functions of Young and Buchanan, as James Melville, in his diary, calls the one the "master" and the other the "preceptor." Young was very lenient towards his royal pupil, but the sternness of Buchanan made such lasting impression on his mind, that long after he had ascended the throne of England he professed his terror at the person and approach of one of his courtiers, because they reminded him so much of his pedagogue. Lest the person of the prince should be degraded by corporeal punishment, a boy was procured to suffer the penalty in his room; and many a time his vicarious cries and sobs taught James what he was thought to deserve for his mistakes in cases and conjugations, parts of speech and prosody. But Buchanan, not content with such polite substitution, occasionally exempted the "whipping-boy," and flogged the original transgressor. Severely provoked in one instance by his pupil's noisy petulance, and by words that sounded like a challenge to touch him, Buchanan laid hold of his birch, unrobed his youthful majesty, and did not spare him for his cries. At this time Buchanan was made director of the chancery, and also privy-seal. The treatise "De Jure Regni apud Scotos" appeared at Edinburgh in 1579, and is dated Stirling, 10th January. The tractate is in the form of a dialogue between the author and Thomas Maitland, and contains an eloquent defence of popular government and its great charter, that liberty should be guarded by law, and not be dependent on the pleasure of the king; that there can be no inherited right of property in man; that sovereigns must be bound by the conditions on which they have received the crown; and that if the occupant of the throne transgress such a paction, he may be resisted and brought to condign punishment. Buchanan's book was immediately assailed by such men as Blackwood, Winzet, Barclay, Lang, and Mackenzie. In 1584, two years after its author's death, it was condemned by parliament; and every person who had a copy of it was ordered, under a penalty of a hundred pounds, to surrender it in forty days. In 1664 the privy council issued a more stringent enactment; and in 1684 the university of Oxford sent it and the political tracts of Milton to the flames. But the "De Jure" will ever remain a noble monument of its author's integrity and acuteness, and of his mental and moral superiority. For while many of his compeers were fettered by misinterpretations of scripture and decisions of early councils, and enslaved by an unworthy and almost superstitious reverence for the existing powers, he maintained in his imperious style the rights of our common humanity, and the theories which modern times and experience have everywhere sanctioned. He argued for liberty in an age of bondage, declaimed against tyrants in an age of tyranny, and laid down those grand principles which now form the basis of constitutional administration.
Buchanan's "Rerum Scoticarum Historia" was published in 1582. It is certainly a very unequal production; its earlier chapters are a mixture of erudition and fable; the latter copied from Boece. The transactions of his own times occupy a large portion of the work, and he chronicles affairs as he felt them, not in all cases precisely as they happened. He was too near them, and too much mixed up with them, to view them with a dispassionate eye. But the style is pure and dignified; the narrative is lucid and full of interest—the whole, as Hallam says, being "redolent of an antique air." When he rebukes, it is with freedom, and when he moralizes, it is with a wisdom that lifts him beyond commonplaces, and with a courage that never forgets the rights, liberties, elevation, and advancement of his species. George Buchanan died 28th September, 1582, aged seventy-six, and was buried in the Greyfriars' churchyard. The scenes of his deathbed are exceedingly characteristic, as given in James Melvill's Diary, published by the Wodrow Society. Buchanan was buried at the public expense, and his funeral was attended "by a great company of the faithful."
No Latin scholar has risen among us like George Buchanan. We willingly contest the palm for him with all competitors, especially in Latin poetry, with Beza, Andrew Melville, Boyd of Trochrigg, Rollock, Arthur Jonston, Scott of Scotstarvet, Kerr, Eaglesim, Henrison, Pitcairne, or Barclay, with Vida, Passerat, or Saint Marthe, or any writer found in Gruter's collection, published in three volumes, under the names of Deliciæ Poetarum, Gallorum, Belgarum, Italorum. (See Poetarum Scotorum Musæ Sacræ; Edin. apud. Tho. et Wal. Ruddimannos, 1739.) He had made the Latin tongue his own. His style is no affected imitation of any favourite author, such as Erasmus in his Ciceronianus, and other satirists, were wont to castigate. It is wonderfully free from mannerisms, though it is sometimes discursive with the air of Livy, and sometimes compact with a resemblance to Tacitus. But it always fits into his thought without any apparent struggle or awkwardness. His poetry is occasionally heavy and rugged, and his hosts of epigrams, while they are always clever, do not always sparkle. His poem "On the Sphere," or in ridicule of the Pythagorean philosophy, which Mr. Hallam thinks one of his best, does not appear to us to deserve so high a place. Its reasonings are lucid, and its exposure of absurdities is telling; but its strokes have more hardness than dexterity, while its wit is ponderous—rather like the gambols of an elephant than the frisking of a squirrel. The Psalms are in every variety of metre, and those Hebrew lyrics, though often diluted and paraphrased, were never clothed in a strange language with less injury to their tenderness, beauty, and devotion. The version of the 104th psalm has often been admired for its spirit and majesty—its magnificent imagery, and musical cadences. The version of the 137th psalm has also been often quoted and eulogized, and so has his ode to May—"Maiæ Calendæ." Had George Buchanan worn a cowl and lived in a cell, no higher scholarship could have been expected of him. But he was a poor wanderer for the greater part of his life—often in want, and as often in danger. Nay more, in his later days he was engrossed by public business, and his love of country was stronger than his love of the Muses. But he never made learned retirement a pretext for neglecting the duties of a patriot and a statesman. So far from being a dreaming pedant, he was a shrewd and indefatigable man of business. In his preface to his "Baptistes," he warns the young king against the effects of flattery and wicked counsellors, and writes more like an experienced statesman than a scholarly recluse. His satirical poems must have greatly aided the Reformation in Scotland, as was similarly done in Germany by the genius of Erasmus. Beza loved the Scottish scholar, and heaped many a compliment upon him; and the learned men of the continent, Thuanus, Le Clerc, Grotius, Scaliger, and Henry Stephens, the giants of those days, were forward in their admiration and esteem. Buchanan was apparently somewhat grim and irritable, and could utter severe and cutting sarcasms. His enemies were treated by him with considerable asperity, but, like all men of his temperament, he lavished his heart upon his friends. His Scottish roughness was not wholly polished away by his French sojourns—the keenness of the northern blast cuts in many of his tirades. Tradition speaks of his wit, and we do not doubt its accuracy; for the flavour and pungency of the Attic salt still exhilarate his readers. His youthful poems are certainly not free from those blemishes which are found in the juvenile productions of Beza; but the coarse and vulgar extravagances ascribed to him as the king's fool or jester, and which are yet current among us, are apocryphal—the most of them being the production of Dougal Graham, the bellman of Glasgow, who, between 1750 and 1779, composed, printed, and published a rare variety of "chap books," such as—George Buchanan; John Cheap the Chapman; Leper the Tailor; Paddy from Cork, &c. These pieces were carried by shoals of pedlars through all the country, and saturated the common mind with their grossness and indecency. (Strang's Clubs of Glasgow, page 92.) A monument has been erected at Killearn to George Buchanan's memory, and a brief Latin poem in honour of the event was composed by the most learned of Scottish schoolmasters, the late Dr. Doig of Stirling. The poem is short, but it is equal in merit to any of the elegies composed at Buchanan's death by Beza, the two Scaligers, Andrew Melville, and others. Buchanan's works are found in two editions, one by Ruddiman, Edinburgh, two vols. folio, 1715, and the other by Burmann, Lugduni Batavorum, two vols. 4to, 1725.—(Irving's Life of Buchanan, second edition, Edinburgh, 1817.)—J. E.
BUCHANAN, James, president of the United States of America, was born in Franklin county, Pennsylvania, April 13, 1791. After completing his education at Dickenson college he studied law, and was a successful practitioner during the short
