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If Buchanan, as some of his detractors have thought, raised himself by subserviency to the intrigues of the Regent Murray, the best heads in Scotland seem to have been of a different opinion. The murder of Murray did not involve Buchanan’s fall. He had avenged it, as far as pen could do it, by that ‘Admonition Direct to the Trew Lordis,’ in which he showed himself as great a master of Scottish, as he was of Latin, prose. His satire of the ‘Chameleon,’ though its publication was stopped by Maitland, must have been read in manuscript by many of those same “True Lords;” and though there were nobler instincts in Maitland than any Buchanan gave him credit for, the satire breathed an honest indignation against that wily turncoat’s misdoings, which could not but recommend the author to all honest men. Therefore it was, I presume, and not because he was a rogue, and a hired literary spadassin, that to the best heads in Scotland he seemed so useful, it may be so worthy, a man, that he be provided with continually increasing employment. As tutor to James I.; as director, for a short time, of the chancery; as keeper of the privy seal, and privy councillor; as one of the commissioners for codifying the laws, and again–for in the semi-anarchic state of Scotland, government had to do everything in the way of organisation–in the committee for promulgating a standard Latin grammar; in the committee for reforming the University of St. Andrew’s: in all these Buchanan’s talents were again and again called for; and always ready. The value of his work, especially that for the reform of St. Andrew’s, must be judged by Scotchmen, rather than by an Englishman: but all that one knows of it justifies Melville’s sentence in the well-known passage in his memoirs, wherein he describes the tutors and household of the young King. “Mr. George was a Stoic philosopher, who looked not far before him;” in plain words, a high-minded and right-minded man, bent on doing the duty which lay nearest him. The worst that can be said against him during these times is, that his name appears with the sum of 100 pounds against it, as one of those “who were to be entertained in Scotland by pensions out of England”; and Ruddiman, of course, comments on the fact by saying that Buchanan “was at length to act under the threefold character of malcontent, reformer, and pensioner:” but it gives no proof whatsoever that Buchanan ever received any such bribe; and in the very month, seemingly, in which that list was written–10th March, 1579–Buchanan had given a proof to the world that he was not likely to be bribed or bought, by publishing a book, as offensive probably to Queen Elizabeth as it was to his own royal pupil; namely, his famous ‘De Jure Regni apud Scotos,’ the very primer, according to many great thinkers, of constitutional liberty. He dedicates that book to King James, “not only as his monitor, but also an importunate and bold exactor, which in these his tender and flexible years may conduct him in safety past the rocks of flattery.” He has complimented James already on his abhorrence of flattery, “his inclination far above his years for undertaking all heroical and noble attempts, his promptitude in obeying his instructors and governors, and all who give him sound admonition, and his judgment and diligence in examining affairs, so that no man’s authority can have much weight with him unless it be confirmed by probable reasons.” Buchanan may have thought that nine years of his stern rule had eradicated some of James’s ill conditions; the petulance which made him kill the Master of Mar’s sparrow, in trying to wrest it out of his hand; the carelessness with which–if the story told by Chytraeus, on the authority of Buchanan’s nephew, be true–James signed away his crown to Buchanan for fifteen days, and only discovered his mistake by seeing Buchanan act in open court the character of King of Scots. Buchanan had at last made him a scholar; he may have fancied that he had made him likewise a manful man: yet he may have dreaded that, as James grew up, the old inclinations would return in stronger and uglier shapes, and that flattery might be, as it was after all, the cause of James’s moral ruin. He at least will be no flatterer. He opens the dialogue which he sends to the king, with a calm but distinct assertion of his mother’s guilt, and a justification of the conduct of men who were now most of them past helping Buchanan, for they were laid in their graves; and then goes on to argue fairly, but to lay down firmly, in a sort of Socratic dialogue, those very principles by loyalty to which the House of Hanover has reigned, and will reign, over these realms. So with his History of Scotland; later antiquarian researches have destroyed the value of the earlier portions of it: but they have surely increased the value of those later portions, in which Buchanan inserted so much which he had already spoken out in his Detection of Mary. In that book also, “liberavit animam suam;” he spoke his mind, fearless of consequences, in the face of a king who he must have known–for Buchanan was no dullard–regarded him with deep dislike, who might in a few years be able to work his ruin.