[1] When I first heard from one of my early schoolmasters the mediÆval chestnut, Quid distat inter sotum et Scotum?—Mensa tantum. (‘What divides a sot (fool) from a Scot?—Only the table’)—the reply was credited to Buchanan.[2] He was Buchanan’s assistant, and called the king’s ‘Pedagogue,’ Buchanan being called ‘Master.’[3] Certain emoluments arising to the feudal superior (in this case the king); which, as they depend on uncertain events, are termed casualties.[4] This covers the meaning more accurately than ‘Physicians.’[5] Burns appears to have afterwards written it down thus:—

The form may be improved, the sentiment could not be.[6] My authority is Herkless’s Cardinal Beaton, p. 153.[7] My non-forensic sympathy, but not my full conviction, goes with Mr. Hosack and Sir John Skelton in their chivalrous but too unmeasured defence of Mary. My verdict in regard to her being ‘art and part’ in putting an end to that traitor in heart and deed, the good-for-nothing, faithless fool Darnley, is a hesitant ‘Not Proven’; but if otherwise, then a distinct non-hesitant ‘served him right.’ Skelton’s clever, interesting book upon Maitland of Lethington, Mary’s most faithful and capable minister, does not throw much, if any, light upon Buchanan. In it he is treated as an opposition pleader, capable rather than scrupulous, who did not know all the facts, and who was instructed by men who had other purposes to serve than telling the whole truth, and who probably did not know it themselves so well as Skelton had opportunities to come to know it, e.g. in regard to the ‘Casket Letters’—documents that could be satisfactory to no modern tribunal except a Dreyfus court-martial. Buchanan’s attack, in a pamphlet written in Scotch, upon Skelton’s hero Maitland, entitled The Chameleon, Skelton sneers at as a ‘Dawb’—not entirely an inaccurate criticism, for The Chameleon is a caricature, and that, of course, means an exaggeration of all faults, actual or presumable. But when a ‘chameleon’ like Disraeli or Maitland, both of whom have found in John Skelton an ingenious and eloquent hero-worshipper, is assailed by satirists in Punch or elsewhere, the only effective condemnatory judgment worth stating is that the caricature is not recognisable by an honest enemy or a free and easy friend. For my part, I believe that the unvarnished truth, though perhaps not the whole of it, can be better inferred from Buchanan than from Skelton.[8] Sir David Brewster, when Principal of the United College of St. Leonard and St. Salvador, had a residence close to St. Leonard’s roofless church. In 1853, Sir David told to a breakfast-party of students, which included Dr. Wallace and the writer, that his house embraced all that existed of Buchanan’s old dwelling-house, and pointed out one particular part of the ancient outer wall thick enough to resist the artillery of Buchanan’s day. Dr. Johnson’s general contempt for Scotland, which did not keep silence in St. Andrews, could not resist the inspiration of the genius loci of St. Leonard’s so far as to prevent his generously recognising Buchanan’s claim to immortality as being as fair as modern Latinity can give, and ‘perhaps fairer than the instability of vernacular languages admit.’[9] Carlyle’s estimate of Knox I accept and credit as the estimate of as penetrating an insight and as true a conscience as ever uttered the verdicts of history; but it is the estimate of a mind that could discover more to approve in the storm than in the sunshine, and who too readily infers noble motives from splendid results. I believe all the good he imputes to Knox and his life-battle for truth, and I don’t believe sufficiently in the vileness of human nature to believe in any of the charges of immorality which rival ecclesiastics have persisted in relating against him. But for all that, I am not blind to his human imperfections. I am far from thinking him to be a perfect man, much less a perfect Christian. His wild joy and unbridled merriment over the dying miseries of Cardinal Beaton and of Mary of Guise would be scarcely in harmony with the budding benevolence of a half-reformed cannibal. His virtues were genuine, and not hypocritical, but they were essentially Pagan virtues—gifts of nature, tested and strengthened, but not acquired, through his experiences as a notary and an ecclesiastic.