ew who care to read modern
Latin poetry--in his elegy on "The Miseries of a Parisian Teacher of the
Humanities." The wretched regent-master, pale and suffering, sits up all
night preparing his lecture, biting his nails and thumping his desk; and
falls asleep for a few minutes, to start up at the sound of the
four-o'clock bell, and be in school by five, his Virgil in one hand, and
his rod in the other, trying to do work on his own account at old
manuscripts, and bawling all the while at his wretched boys, who cheat
him, and pay each other to answer to truants' names. The class is all
wrong. "One is barefoot, another's shoe is burst, another cries, another
writes home. Then comes the rod, the sound of blows, and howls; and the
day passes in tears." "Then mass, then another lesson, then more blows;
there is hardly time to eat." I have no space to finish the picture of
the stupid misery which, Buchanan says, was ruining his intellect, while
it starved his body. However, happier days came. Gilbert Kennedy, Earl
of Cassilis, who seems to have been a noble young gentleman, took him as
his tutor for the next five years; and with him he went back to Scotland.

But there his plain speaking got him, as it did more than once afterward,
into trouble. He took it into his head to write, in imitation of Dunbar,
a Latin poem, in which St. Francis asks him in a dream to become a Gray
Friar, and Buchanan answered in language which had the unpleasant fault
of being too clever, and--to judge from contemporary evidence--only too
true. The friars said nothing at first; but when King James made
Buchanan tutor to one of his natural sons, they, "men professing
meekness, took the matter somewhat more angrily than befitted men so
pious in the opinion of the people." So Buchanan himself puts it: but,
to do the poor friars justice, they must have been angels, not men, if
they did not writhe somewhat under the scourge which he had laid on them.
To be told that there was hardly a place in heaven for monks, was hard to
hear and bear. They accused him to the king of heresy; but not being
then in favour with James, they got no answer, and Buchanan was commanded
to repeat the castigation. Having found out that the friars were not to
be touched with impunity, he wrote, he says, a short and ambiguous poem.
But the king, who loved a joke, demanded something sharp and stinging,
and Buchanan obeyed by writing, but not publishing, "The Franciscans,"