a
long satire, compared to which the "Somnium" was bland and merciful. The
storm rose. Cardinal Beaten, Buchanan says, wanted to buy him of the
king, and then, of course, burn him, as he had just burnt five poor
souls; so, knowing James's avarice, he fled to England, through
freebooters and pestilence.

There he found, he says, "men of both factions being burned on the same
day and in the same fire"--a pardonable exaggeration--"by Henry VIII., in
his old age more intent on his own safety than on the purity of
religion." So to his beloved France he went again, to find his enemy
Beaten ambassador at Paris. The capital was too hot to hold him; and he
fled south to Bordeaux, to Andrea Govea, the Portuguese principal of the
College of Guienne. As Professor of Latin at Bordeaux, we find him
presenting a Latin poem to Charles V.; and indulging that fancy of his
for Latin poetry which seems to us nowadays a childish pedantry, which
was then--when Latin was the vernacular tongue of all scholars--a
serious, if not altogether a useful, pursuit. Of his tragedies, so
famous in their day--the "Baptist," the "Medea," the "Jephtha," and the
"Alcestis"--there is neither space nor need to speak here, save to notice
the bold declamations in the "Baptist" against tyranny and priestcraft;
and to notice also that these tragedies gained for the poor Scotsman, in
the eyes of the best scholars of Europe, a credit amounting almost to
veneration. When he returned to Paris, he found occupation at once; and,
as his Scots biographers love to record, "three of the most learned men
in the world taught humanity in the same college," viz. Turnebus,
Muretus, and Buchanan.

Then followed a strange episode in his life. A university had been
founded at Coimbra, in Portugal, and Andrea Govea had been invited to
bring thither what French savants he could collect. Buchanan went to
Portugal with his brother Patrick, two more Scotsmen, Dempster and
Ramsay, and a goodly company of French scholars, whose names and
histories may be read in the erudite pages of Dr. Irving, went likewise.
All prospered in the new Temple of the Muses for a year or so. Then its
high-priest, Govea, died; and, by a peripeteia too common in those days
and countries, Buchanan and two of his friends migrated unwillingly from
the Temple of the Muses for that of Moloch, and found themselves in the
Inquisition.

Buchanan, it seems, had said that St. Augustine was more of a Luther