CHARACTERISTICS Buchanan’s life, like the lives of most people who have done anything worth speaking of in their time, divides itself roughly into two sections—the period of preparation, and the period of performance. What I shall call his period of performance, or at all events chief performance, was from the time when he finally returned to Scotland, after an absence abroad, with brief interruptions, of twenty-two years, and spent the remaining twenty-one years of his life in more or less intimate occupation with the public affairs of his country. On the 19th of August 1561, Queen Mary, then in her nineteenth year, landed at Leith, and was escorted to Holyrood by her enthusiastic subjects, by whom she was also serenaded at night in a style which, as the queen’s French retinue thought, showed more heart than art. Shortly before or after this date, Buchanan, now fifty-five years old, also appeared in Scotland, for his final settlement there. It is a curious It was, for instance, mainly during the preparation or foreign period that Buchanan wrote those poems which stamped him not only as a man of wit and poetic genius, but as the first Latin stylist in Europe of his day. During this period, too, he acquired from classic and other sources those broad and comprehensive ideas on the leading questions of the day which made him the thinker and Humanist as contrasted with the mere cleric or scholastic obscurantist. It was then also that, through observation on the spot, he was able to comprehend the ‘true inwardness’ of the struggle that was going forward between the old Of course I do not mean to say that Buchanan did all this consciously and systematically; that he deliber Millionaires are seldom so of set design. They begin, most probably, by aiming at a competent fortune, but having got that length, the acquired delight in pulling the strings of an extensive and possibly adventurous undertaking, and not mere miserly greed, has kept them at a task which they find they can perform, until the millions roll in as a justification of their ideas and processes. In politics and the professions men probably set out with a general aim at the best position and the most money they can make for themselves; but very few, I should imagine, of those who have reached the greatest eminence or prosperity possible to them said in their youth, ‘I mean to be Prime Minister, or Lord Chancellor, or Archbishop of Canterbury, or President of the Royal College of Physicians, or of the Royal Academy.’ Buchanan seems to have belonged to a type of character which does not include either of the classes of persons just considered. Neither cupidity nor ambition nor any of the ordinary self-aggrandising motives seems to have had much, if any, place in his character. Apostrophising Buchanan in his Funeral Elegy, Joseph Scaliger says:— ‘Contemptis opibus, spretis popularibus auris, VentosÆque fugax ambitionis, obis.’
This was literally true. Buchanan lived from hand to mouth during the greater part of his career. But there is no evidence that he ever tried to make a fortune. He might have prospered in the Church, as Dunbar was willing to do. But he had ideas of his own on that subject, and neither gold nor dignities could tempt him to sell his soul. Begging Letter-WriterHe was often ‘hard up,’ but it does not appear to have depressed his spirits. Indeed, he is never sprightlier, more epigrammatically witty, or more genially humorous than when he is what some of us might call ‘begging’ from some wealthy friend who could appreciate his genius and accomplishments. Here, for instance, is a ‘begging letter’ to Queen Mary, in the days when they were still friends, and read Livy, and doubtless indulged in fencing-matches of wit together:— ‘Do quod adest: opto quod abest tibi: dona darentur Aurea, sors animo si foret Æqua meo. Hoc leve si credis, paribus me ulciscere donis: Et quod abest, opta tu mihi: da quod adest.’ Which may be literally, or nearly so, according ‘to the ‘To you I give what I do have: for you I wish what you don’t have: Golden, indeed, would be my gifts, were Fortune equal to my will. If you should chance to think this levity, in equal levities have your revenge: For me wish you what I don’t have: to me give you what you do have.’ Dr. Hume Brown puts it neatly into rhyme thus:— ‘I give you what I have: I wish you what you lack: And weightier were my gift, were fortune at my back. Perchance you think I jest? A like jest then I crave: Wish for me what I lack, and give me what you have.’ Take another in the same strain:— ‘Ad Jacobum, MoraviÆ Comitem. ‘Si magis est, ut Christus ait, donare beatum, Quam de munifica dona referre manu: Aspice quam faveam tibi: sis ut dando beatus, Non renuo fieri, te tribuente, miser.’
Or, to cite Dr. Brown again:— ‘It is more blest, saith Holy Writ, to give than to receive: How great, then, is your debt to me, who take whate’er you give!’ With equally humorous familiarity he sends in an application, ‘Ad MatthÆum LeviniÆ Comitem, ScotiÆ Proregem’ (To Matthew, Earl of Lennox, Regent of Scotland’). I quote only the concluding couplet:— ‘Denique da quidvis, podagram modo deprecor unam: Munus erit medicis aptius illa suis.’ That is—
Or to fall back on Dr. Brown’s translation once more:— ‘Since I am poor and you are rich, what happy chance is thine! My modest wishes, too, you know—one nugget from your mine! Only, whatever be your gift, let it not be your gout: That, a meet present for your leech, I’d rather go without.’ These are merely samples of many communications, similar in object and style, which he addressed, at various periods of his life, to quarters where he thought they would not be ill-taken. As a rule, he supported himself by ‘regenting’ in colleges, or acting as tutor in royal or noble families. It was only when he could Of course, in this age of contract and commerce, we are apt to associate an idea of meanness and pitifulness with the conduct of Buchanan and Erasmus and others in this matter. Our first feeling is that nobody should give any other body anything except according to bargain. Every man should be independent, and if he asks anything outside a contract, he might as well go bankrupt at once. He must clearly be a weakling, Then there was still the tradition of hospitality which the Old Church, with all its faults, had kept up. In these contractual days of ours, there is very little hospitality, as it was defined by the Author of Christianity. A modern dinner is generally a meeting of creditors, or a combination of clever or stupid epicureans, the better to amuse or otherwise enjoy themselves, according to their tastes in meat and drink, or even conversation. It is often a case of undisguised ‘treating’ on the part of the so-called host, who wants to use his so-called guests for a purpose, and whose performance might very appropriately go into a schedule to some of the Bribery and Corruption Acts. But in the days of the Old Church, a wandering or needy scholar would have been welcomed at many, if not all, of the religious houses, and treated on a very different footing from our applicants for relief at the casual wards of one of our workhouses, probably the only institution resembling Christian hospitality authorised by modern organised society. This latter may be a better arrangement, for anything I know to the contrary. All I say is that it is different from what was recognised in Buchanan’s day. It would never occur to Buchanan that he was doing anything inconsistent with self-respect in putting his position before people like Queen Mary, or Moray, or In these respects Buchanan was an invaluable acquisition to persons like Mary, or Moray, or Lennox, or Knox, who must have winked at a good deal in Buchanan, which he would not have stood in a less potent ally. In his prime, and even until his death, no one had an equal command over the universal ear of cultured Europe. To the rulers of his time he was worth what, say, fifty friendly editors of newspapers—including the Times and all the sixpenny weeklies, as far as they are worth anything I am dwelling on this point because it will save time and trouble afterwards, and accordingly I ask further if Edie Ochiltree, in later times, and in a less feudalistic state of public sentiment, could beg round the district, without loss of respect, on the strength of his badge and uniform, testifying to past good service in his time and station, why should not an eminent public servant like Buchanan, in a totally different state of general feeling on such matters, ask society, through representatives of it who, he knew, should not and would not treat him roughly, to help him in prosecuting his shining and useful career? He had done a good work on the High Street of the World. He had sung it a song or played it a melody such as it would hear nowhere else. Was he not entitled to send round his hat among the listeners? Is it not what is done by every book-writer of to-day, Buchanan’s enemies say that in accepting maintenance or preferment he sold his independence to the donors, and when it is answered that he showed anything but want of independence in the case of Queen Mary and others, whom he subsequently came to oppose in the public interest, they tack about and accuse him of the basest ingratitude—in biting the hand that fed him, as they put it. It is as if in these days Sir Gorgias Midas, M.P., were to say to some No Notoriety HunterThis discussion arose in our endeavour to determine Buchanan’s character so far as money-making was concerned. He was no money-maker. Contemptis opibus—‘despising wealth’—is, as we have seen, Joseph Scaliger’s account of him, meaning thereby that personally he did not care for more money than would maintain the much other than money-making career which he liked, and had set his heart on, keeping himself independent by the labour of a scholar, but not hesitating to ask payment, when he wanted it, from a society that was morally indebted to him. His indifference, however, to wealth as a life-object must not be confounded with the counsel of the ascetic preacher who urges his hearers to forget the present Neither does he appear to have set his heart upon the ordinary objects of ambition, in the shape of fame or power. ‘Dear is fame to the rhyming tribe.’ ‘That dearest wish of every poetic bosom—to be distinguished,’ said Burns in his preface to the first edition of his poems, and he, if any one, was entitled to speak. But in the same preface he also says that to amuse himself amidst toil, to transcribe the feelings in his own breast, to find some counterpoise to the struggles of a world alien and uncouth to the poetic mind—‘these His most famous production as a poet, his version of the Hebrew Psalms, or rather series of poems based upon these, was certainly not written for fame. Every Humanist of eminence was expected to try his hand upon the Psalms, and when Buchanan found himself in Portugal under lock and key, at the instance of the Inquisition, among a set of monks, whom he hits off as equally good-natured and ignorant, and who had been told off to instruct him in orthodoxy, he addressed himself to a classic rendering of the Psalms with the double purpose of discharging his duty by his Humanistic Vocation, and doing something that might redeem What does he say on the matter himself? Writing to Tycho Brahe in 1576, six years before his death, and more than twenty after he began to work at the Sphere, he says that bad health had compelled him, spem scribendi carminis in posterum penitus abjicere,—‘completely to abandon the hope of writing a poem for posterity.’ Three years afterwards, writing to a literary friend in England, who, like many others, kept dunning him for his promised books, and even for ‘copy,’ he says, with respect to his ‘astronomical’ aims in poetry, he had not so much voluntarily abandoned them, as been obliged reluctantly to submit to the deprivation of them; neque enim aut nunc libet nugari, aut si maxime vellem per Ætatem licet. Accessit eo historiÆ scribendÆ labor,—‘for neither am I now greatly All this does not look very like a burning eagerness for posthumous fame, at all events of the kind that moves a certain class of people to leave money for hospitals, or almshouses, or learned foundations, to perpetuate names that would otherwise never have risen out of obscurity or escaped oblivion. As a matter of fact, Buchanan knew that he was celebrated, but no one had a poorer opinion of the work that had won him reputation than he had himself, not from the modesty of merit, as the common form carelessly puts it, but from the consciousness of merit, and because he felt that it was in him to do better. He hated the idea of having more celebrity than he deserved, and wanted to produce something that would show he was not an impostor or a quack. In short, he did not want more fame, but what he thought a better and honester title to the fame he had. That, however, is not the passion for fame, but simply self-respect, and an unselfish anxiety for the good name of those friends Buchanan himself tells us why he gave up the Sphere and took up the History. It was primarily to gratify his friends, who thought that such a work was a want of the time, more useful and more suitable to Buchanan’s years than poetry; while he himself assures us, and there is no reason to doubt his declaration, that he desired to set before his royal pupil, James VI., the warnings and the encouragements derivable from the story of his predecessors on the throne, including his own ill-advised and ill-fated mother. It was no fault of Buchanan’s if James despised his teacher’s counsel, and, listening to flatterers, took up with the Divine Right doctrine, by impressing which on his unhappy son, both through precept and example, he virtually destined him to jump the life to come from the scaffold of Whitehall. Buchanan’s friends seem to have tried to tempt him to undertake the History by representing that no sub |