John Buchanan

“ Andrews students, from poet Buchanan to poet Fergusson, who about two and a half centuries later sat at the bursar’s free table and said grace over the too plentiful college rabbits that [Pg 119] were last century procured from the links that now swarm only with golfers. He was sent there, he tells in his Autobiography, to ‘sit at the feet of John Major,’ the celebrated logician of that age; but he did not long sit at his feet as pupil before he felt in a position to criticise his master as a teacher of sophistry rather than logic. ”

“ The Democrats, shelving the now unpopular Pierce, nominated James Buchanan, [187] —a weak character, far past the prime of life, but a man who had held high positions and was likely to carry the important state of Pennsylvania. John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky was chosen as Buchanan’s running mate. Buchanan won at the polls, securing one hundred and seventy-four electoral votes to Frémont’s one hundred and fourteen. But the Republicans had made a better fight than any new party had ever done before and had carried most of the Northern and some of the Western states. ”

“ Buchanan, on the intellectual side of him, was not merely a poet, but a wit and humorist—a type of mind not in itself easy to harmonise with being of ‘gud religion.’ Perhaps if the Puritans had not been in so many cases hopelessly wooden, it might have saved their cause from having so many joints in its harness open to the shafts of the satirical sharpshooter, but they would probably not have done so great and grave a work in the world. ”

“ Nor must the treatment experienced by Buchanan at Lisbon be here omitted, as it affords a convincing proof, that the fine genius of Camoens was the true source of his misfortunes. John III. earnest to promote the cultivation of polite literature among his subjects, engaged Buchanan, the most elegant Latinist, perhaps, of modern times, to teach philosophy and the belles lettres at Lisbon. But the design of the monarch was soon frustrated by the cardinal Henry and the clergy. Buchanan was committed to prison, because it was alleged he had eaten flesh in Lent ”

“ He may not have been infallible, but he had insight, veracity, and courage, the like of which will never be exhibited by his traducers to the end of time. Those who can believe him guilty of base ingratitude and malicious falsehood are incapable of discriminating the best from the worst in human nature and in human history.
Buchanan’s truthfulness and resolute desire to be impartial can be best inferred in our time from his History of Scotland, at which he had written for years, and for which he had collected materials from his boyhood. ”

“ John and Shakespeare, Mary Magdalene and Mary Shelley, the angels of the church and the winged pterodactyls of the chalk, flashed and faded in everchanging kaleidoscopic dream.
The mood which welcomed all forms of belief, embraced none utterly, but contemplated all, became vague, chaotic, and transcendental; and Ambrose Bradley found himself in a fairy world where nothing seemed real and solemn enough as a law for life. ”

“ Few men of any country have had such versatility of talent, and have in life found tasks so varied as George Buchanan and Robert Wallace. No other Scotsman known to me, through credible report or in the flesh, has had the personal experience that would enable him so well to understand and interpret the personal experience of George Buchanan. Both were pre-eminent in the university learning of their respective eras, which had little in common except Latin; scholastic logic and metaphysic being the dominating study of Buchanan’s days, as inductive positive science is of ours. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Buchanan in face of the present crisis; and that poor fellow's craven abjuration of his "former friend," Friar John, is magnanimity itself, compared with his almost-ex-Excellency's treatment of the Free States in his last Message to Congress. There are times when mediocrity is a dangerous quality, and a man may drown himself as effectually in milk-and-water as in Malmsey. ”

“ Bearing in mind that Buchanan carried his life in his hand, and that he had never undertaken the function of religious teacher, only a very heroic person could afford to say that he had not done all he dared, and that he showed himself deeply in earnest about Truth, when at last he had the opportunity, and really ‘was of gud religion for a poet,’ and even for a more hopeful character. ”

“ The politics familiar to Buchanan included the ethics that prompted and the arts that effected the murders of Cardinal Beaton, Rizzio, Darnley, Regent Moray, and Queen Mary, and that often imperilled his own life. Nevertheless, worn out by his years and assiduous labours, he died in his bed when his work was done, a fortnight after his History of his country was published, and before his old pupil the Scottish Solomon had time to discover all the treason it contained ”

“ Literature was not yet a profession or ‘bread-study.’ It was not till next century that Milton got £5 for Paradise Lost; and even Shakespeare made his money less as a writer than as a showman. The idea of Buchanan or Erasmus—a much more importunate beggar than Buchanan—going into business, say the wine or the wool trade, would have been absurd. They would have ruined any house that adopted them in two or three years, to say nothing of the indecency of allowing intellectual leaders of high genius to be lost in work which could be much better done by humbler men. ”

“ The wants and troubles of his country beset Buchanan with many a call of duty, and cast upon him loads of multifarious work, such as perhaps never in the history of human-kind before were thrown upon the most accomplished and studious of living men. The tasks assigned to Buchanan, and the duties imposed upon him, reflect no inconsiderable honour and credit upon his lawless, homicidal, half-civilised countrymen. ”

“ The culprit was a certain General Harney who [19] in a high-handed manner occupied the island without authorization, and conducted himself in a generally offensive manner, but although President Buchanan was considerably embarrassed by his action, he was too much afraid of the press and the mob to order the withdrawal of the troops. For some time there appeared to be a chance of an actual collision, and Lord John Russell showed considerable irritation. ”

“ 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 [Pg 37] Lennox, and asking their temporary aid or a permanent office. They had taken over the wealth of the religious houses; did not their hospitalities pass with it? They had divided up the country among themselves and others; were they not honourably bound to see that a great civilising force like Buchanan was not extinguished? Besides, he understood his own value. A man is not six feet six inches high without being aware of it. ”

“ Of course, comparison of things or people generically distinct is scarcely possible. You can hardly compare a snuff-box and a policeman. But it seems less difficult to ask whether Cæsar or Shakespeare, Alfred the Great or Alfred Tennyson, was the greater man. However that may be, there can be no doubt that Buchanan rose to very great eminence as an intellectual artist, both in prose and verse. He enjoyed an unsurpassed European reputation among the Renaissance magnates of his day. ”

“ If any one desires to see how Buchanan could appreciate and address the highest type of womanhood, let him read such verses as the Ad Mildredam or the Ad Camillam Morelliam, and he will see that he was a man with tenderness in him as well as virility, with grace as well as severity of speech ”

“ I shall not labour the point of one stage of his performance being preparatory to another.
Of course I do not mean to say that Buchanan did all this consciously and systematically; that he deliber [Pg 29] ately prepared abroad, and then came and deliberately performed at home. Few men, especially men of Buchanan’s type, shape their lives on such lines of exact and exhaustive purpose. I leave out of account the unhappily large class who foolishly, and even wickedly, throw away their lives, and have hardly ever tried or desired to make a better of it. ”

“ Neither the beautiful, brilliant Mary nor her erratic but not stupid race could understand the teaching of Buchanan as an exposition of the law of the King of kings. The fate of that race, from her flight to England to the flight from Culloden, has helped the world to understand it. They were doomed to be born in and live through ages of ignor [Pg 132] ance, superstition, and falsehood, in which few men arose who could discover and recognise truth and publish it at their risk for the dark here and the darker hereafter, as was done by Buchanan. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Scotland, directed against the Hamiltons and their friends—a publication full of practical insight, good sense, and cogent argument, the work of a wise, earnest, sagacious man, who in the zeal for the good of his country forgot that he had the gift of poetic inspiration, in that respect very unlike his great successor Milton when he too became a political pamphleteer, more rhapsodical than relevant. He suspected the Hamiltons of a desire to secure the crown, and Buchanan very much preferred to them Queen Mary and her son, whose birth he had welcomed as a star of hope for his country. ”

“ Alleged Vindictiveness The fastidious Sir James seems to think that Buchanan rather stepped down from the high ‘Stoik philosopher’ pedestal in being what he calls ‘extrem vengeable against any man that had offendit him.’ But, as already suggested, Dr. Johnson, who was a tolerable authority on the higher morality, would have been rather prejudiced in Buchanan’s favour on this very account, and would probably have wished to know Sir James’s evidence for unfavourably meant reflection, and would certainly have thought that it did not amount to much. ”

“ It may be objected that men like Buchanan and Erasmus did not act honestly in remaining silent and conforming members of a system which they secretly regarded as in many vital respects false, and an imposture upon the world. Of course, it is to be said for Buchanan that he did ultimately come out of it; but then, why not sooner? Why did he not earlier follow the lead of Luther and Calvin and Knox? [Pg 103] For one thing, it must be remembered that even these great heroes of veracity had probably their reticences. At all events, they have left to us the legacy of an incompletely performed work. ”

“ Buchanan as ‘a singular man,’ while of ‘Mester Peter Young’ they say that he was ‘specially well affected, and ready to persuade the king to be in favour of her majestye.’
Three years after dedicating the Baptistes to James in the style we have seen, he dedicated the De Jure to him (1579) . This was a still bolder and more inde [Pg 61] pendent proceeding. ”

“ George Buchanan had sometimes, as I have heard, been a preacher at St Andrews: after his long travells he was employed by our church and state to be a teacher to king James and his family: of his faithfulnesse in this charge he left, I believe, to the world good and satisfactory tokens: the eminency of this person was so great, that no society of men need be ashamed to have been moderated by his wisdome. ”

“ After having remained in Paris for the space of two years, which he must have employed to much better purpose than most youths of his age, the death of his kind uncle reduced him again to poverty. Partly on this account, partly from ill health, he returned to his own country, and spent a year at home. Alter having recruited his strength, he entered as a common soldier into a body of troops that was brought over from France by John Duke of Albany, then Regent 130of Scotland, for the purpose of opposing the English. Buchanan himself says that he went into the army “to learn the art of war;” ”

“ John Knox, in point of culture and of pure intellect and reason, was a small man—a rash, daring, half-educated schoolboy, compared with Buchanan. Knowledge and reason are conservative forces, and Knox could not have been great had he not been a destroyer. His most indelible historical records are the ruins of cathedrals and other religious houses, ‘rooks’ nests’ requiring to be pulled down only in the judgment of blind superstition and rabid fanaticism. For the ignorance and savagery of the people of Scotland the Church of Rome was primarily to blame. ”