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 statement of Melville already quoted and from numerous anecdotes, apocryphal or otherwise, that Buchanan, who as a member of the Lennox family had a special hatred for Queen Mary, extended his dislike to the "true bird of that bloody nest," l and that this feeling was reciprocal. Other evidence could be given, if it were necessary, to show that the influence of Buchanan ended with the ascendancy of d'Aubigny in the King's thirteenth year.

The remarks of Melville, favorable to Buchanan as they are, indicate that the King's second tutor, Peter Young, adopted a more tactful and possibly a wiser attitude. When he returned from Geneva to enter upon his duties, he was a young man of about twenty-five. Buchanan speaks of him as "adolescens probus et doctus" ; 2 and the testimony of the English representative Bowes, who in 1580 wrote that he would take no money for his influence over the King, 3 is in itself, considering the practices of the period, an ample certificate of character. Young was ap- pointed Master Almoner (October 25, 1577), Envoy to Den- mark (1585 and later), one of the "Octavians" in charge of the King's finances (1596), and tutor to Prince Charles and "chief overseer" of his household (i6o4). 4 To him fell perhaps the larger share of the King's instruction and entertainment in his boyhood.

Neither of the tutors could refrain from the temptation to turn his apt pupil into a prodigy of learning. He was "the sweitest sight in Europe that day," writes the diarist Melville, with an enthusiasm which cooled as the prodigy grew older, "for strange and extraordinar gifts of ingyne, judgement, memorie and language. I hard him discours, walking upe and doun in the auld Lady Marr's hand, of knawlage and ignorance, to my greit mervell and estonish- ment." 5 Killigrew, in another well-known passage written

1 Quoted from a remark attributed to Buchanan in D. Irving, Memoirs of the Life and Works of George Buchanan, London, 1807, p. 169.

2 Opera, ed. 1715, Vol. II ; Episiola, p. 12.


 * Bowes' Correspondence, Surtees Soc., p. 28, June 3, 1580.

4 G. F. Warner, The Library of James VI, Scot. Hist. Soc., pp. xiii-xv.

1 Diary, Bann. Club, p. 38 (1574).