Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 2.djvu/132

426 in their several provinces, but none of them has evinced the same capability of universal attainment Horace and Livy wrote in the language they had learned from their mothers, but its very acquisition was to Buchanan the result of much youthful labour. Yet he writes with the purity and elegance of an ancient Reman. Unfettered by the classical restraints which shrivel the powers of an ordinary mind, he expatiates with all the characteristic energy of strong and original sentiment; he produces new combinations of fancy, and invests them with language equally polished and appropriate. His diction uniformly displays a happy vein of elegant and masculine simplicity, and is distinguished by that propriety and perspicuity which can only be attained by a man perfectly master of his ideas and of the language in which he writes. It is probable that nineteen out of every twenty of the readers of these pages, are already aware of the great merit of Buchanan's poetry, without having ever seen or read a single line of it, either in its original, or in a translated form. I shall endeavour to correct this, by subjoining translations of three of his best small poems, executed by my esteemed friend, Mr Robert Hogg of Edinburgh, whose accurate taste and deep poetical sensibility are conspicuous in two articles already contributed by him to this work and. It will be observed, from these compositions, which present the ideas and spirit of the original with wonderful fidelity, how different a poet Buchanan must have been from the still and conceited rhymesters of his own age and country.

The variety of his