Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 07.djvu/197

 1571,, iv. 5). The post of tutor suited Buchanan better than that of a political writer, and there can be little doubt that he devoted himself with diligence and zeal to the discharge of his office. Melville writes in his ‘Memoirs’ that Buchanan was one of James's ‘four principal masters,’ and ‘that he held the king in great awe,’ that unlike another of these masters who carried ‘himself warily, as a man who had a mind to his own weal, by keeping of his majesty's favour, Mr. George was a Stoick philosopher, who looked not far before him. A man of notable endowments for his learning and knowledge of Latin poesie. Much honoured in other countries, pleasant in conversation, rehearsing on all occasions moralities short and instructive, whereof he had abundance, inventing where he wanted. He was also of good religion for a poet; but he was easily abused, and so facill that he was led with any company that he haunted for the tym, quhilk maid him factious in his old dayis; for he spoke and writ as they that were about him for the tym informed him; for he was become sliperie and careless, and followed in many things the vulgar oppinions; for he was naturally populair and extreme vengeable against any man that had offendit him, quhilk was his gratest fault.’ James entertained a lively recollection of the discipline of his tutor, and when a person in high office whom he disliked came near him he used to say ‘he trembled at his approach, it reminded him so of his pedagogue.’ Yet his references to Buchanan are not so severe as might have been anticipated. He denounced his ‘History,’ indeed, as well as that of Knox, as an infamous invective, and coins for the authors the epithet ‘Archibellonses of Rebellion.’ But on the ‘De Jure Regni’ he pronounces the curious judgment: ‘Buchanan I reckon and rank among poets, not among divines, classical or common. If the man hath burst out here and there into some traces of excess or speech of bad temper, that must be imputed to the violence of his humour and heat of his spirit, not in any wise to the rules of treu religion rightly by him conceived before.’ In his speech at Stirling to the university of Edinburgh James praised his Latin learning. ‘All the world knows,’ he said, ‘that my master, George Buchanan, was a great master in that faculty. I follow his pronunciation, both of his Latin and Greek, and am sorry that my people of England do not the like; for certainly their pronunciation utterly fails the grace of these two learned languages.’

The retirement of Morton in 1578, and the emancipation of the king from any regency, also emancipated him from his tutors. On 3 May 1578, a new ‘ordour of the keeping of the king’ was framed, to which his own signature is attached. John, earl of Mar, was given the custody of his person, with an injunction that he was not to be removed from the castle of Stirling, and his instruction was still committed to ‘Masteris George Buchanan and Peter Young, his present pedagoguis, or sic as sall be hereafter electit by his Hiness … of his said counsale to that charge, aggreing in religion with the saidis Maisteris George and Peter.’ But though Buchanan still nominally held this office, to which he refers in the dedications of the ‘De Jure Regni’ and of his ‘Historia Scotorum,’ James was allowed to leave Stirling in the following year, and growing age and infirmity prevented Buchanan from acting personally as the king's tutor. His active spirit did not confine itself at any time to the education of the king. He had been rewarded for his services by the post of director of chancery in 1570, which he seems to have held only for a short time, since in the same year he was appointed to the higher office of keeper of the privy seal, which he held till 1578, when he resigned in favour of his nephew Thomas. This office gave him a seat both in the privy council and in parliament, and he acted on commissions for the digest of the laws, for the reform of the universities, and for the compilation of a Latin grammar, over which he presided, and for which he compiled a short prosody, printed in his works. He was also one of the commission appointed by parliament in 1578 to examine a book on the ‘Policy of the Kirk.’ In 1574 the general assembly placed under his revision, along with Peter Young, Andrew Melville, and James Lawson, Adamson's Latin version of the Book of Job, which was to be published if found agreeable to God's Word.

So busy a life probably left little time for correspondence, and few of Buchanan's letters have been preserved; but those of his correspondents are of considerable interest from their various nationalities, and the light they throw on the literary commerce of the sixteenth century. They were the leading scholars who had embraced the reformed doctrines in England and the Low Countries, France, and Switzerland. All express the greatest interest in Buchanan's writings, and request him to publish or revise them. Randolph presses him to write his own life; but all that came of this request was the brief fragment prefixed to his works, written in 1580, which unfortunately stops short at his return to Scotland. Among his friends whose letters have been preserved are Theodore Beza, Elias Vinet,