Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 2.djvu/119

Rh tractions for a Scotsman; and it must have been peculiarly galling to the lofty spirit of Buchanan, after stooping to solicit patronage among the natural enemies of his country, to find his efforts despised, and his necessities disregarded. Meeting with so little encouragement there, he passed over to Paris, where he was well known, and had many acquaintances. But here to his dismay he found Cardinal Beaton resident as ambassador from the Scottish court. This circumstance rendered it extremely unsafe for him to remain ; happily he was invited to Bourdeaux by Andrew Govea, a Portuguese, principal of the college of Guienne, lately founded in that city, through whose interest he was appointed professor of humanity in that afterwards highly famed seminary. Here Buchanan remained for three years, during which he completed four Tragedies, besides composing a number of poems on miscellaneous subjects. He was all this while the object of the unwearied enmity of Cardinal Beaton and the Franciscans, who still threatened his life. The Cardinal at one time wrote to the bishop of Bourdeaux, commanding him to secure the person of the heretical poet, which might perhaps have been done ; but the letter falling into the hands of one of the poet's friends, was detained till the appearance of a pestilence in Guienne absorbed every lesser concern. The death of James V. following soon after, with the distractions consequent on that event, gave the Cardinal more than enough to do at home without taking cognizance of heretics abroad. Among his pupils at Bourdeaux, Buchanan numbered the celebrated Michael de Montagne, who was an actor in every one of his dramas; and among his friends were not only his fellow professors, but all the men of literature and science in the city and neighbourhood. One of the most illustrious of these was the elder Scaliger, who resided and practised as a physician at Agin; at his house Buchanan and the other professors used to spend part of their vacations. Here they wero hospitably entertained, and in their society Scaliger seems not only to have forgot, as he himself acknowledges, the tortures of the gout, but, what was more extraordinary, his natural talent for contradiction. The many excellent qualities of this eminent scholar, and the grateful recollection of his conversational talents, Buchanan has preserved in an elegant Latin Epigram, apparently written at the time when he was about to quit this seat of the muses, to enter upon new scenes of difficulty and danger. The younger Scaliger was but a boy when Buchanan visited at his father's house; but he inherited all his father's admiration of the Scottish poet, whom he declared to be decidedly superior to all the Latin poets of those times. After having resided three years at Bourdeaux, and conferred lustre upon its University by the splendour of his talents, Buchanan removed, for reasons which we are not acquainted with, to Paris; and in 1544, we find him one of the regents in the college of Cardinal le Moire, which station he seems to have held till 1547. There he had for his associates, among other highly respectable names, the celebrated Turnebus and Muretus. By a Latin elegy addressed to his late colleagues Tastoeus and Tevius, we learn that about this period he had a severe attack of the gout, and that he had been under the medical care of Carolus Stephanus, who was a doctor of physic of the faculty of Paris, and, like several of his relations, was equally distinguished as a scholar and as a printer. In the same elegy, Buchanan commemorates the kindness of his colleagues, particularly of Gelida, an amiable and learned Spaniard, less eminent for talents than Buchanan's other colleagues, Turnebus and Muretus, but as a man of true moral worth and excellence, at least equal to the former and vastly superior to the latter, who, though a man of splendid talents, was worthless in the extreme. To Muretus, Buchanan addressed a copy of verses on a Tragedy written by him in his youth, entitled Julius Cæsar; but Muretus had not as yet put forth those