an
than a Catholic on the question of the mass. He and his friends had
eaten flesh in Lent; which, he says, almost everyone in Spain did. But
he was suspected, and with reason, as a heretic; the Gray Friars formed
but one brotherhood throughout Europe; and news among them travelled
surely if not fast, so that the story of the satire written in Scotland
had reached Portugal. The culprits were imprisoned, examined,
bullied--but not tortured--for a year and a half. At the end of that
time, the proofs of heresy, it seems, were insufficient; but lest, says
Buchanan with honest pride, "they should get the reputation of having
vainly tormented a man not altogether unknown," they sent him for some
months to a monastery, to be instructed by the monks. "The men," he
says, "were neither inhuman nor bad, but utterly ignorant of religion;"
and Buchanan solaced himself during the intervals of their instructions,
by beginning his Latin translation of the Psalms.

At last he got free, and begged leave to return to France; but in vain.
And so, wearied out, he got on board a Candian ship at Lisbon, and
escaped to England. But England, he says, during the anarchy of Edward
VI.'s reign, was not a land which suited him; and he returned to France,
to fulfil the hopes which he had expressed in his charming "Desiderium
Lutitiae," and the still more charming, because more simple, "Adventus in
Galliam," in which he bids farewell, in most melodious verse, to "the
hungry moors of wretched Portugal, and her clods fertile in naught but
penury."

Some seven years succeeded of schoolmastering and verse-writing: the
Latin paraphrase of the Psalms; another of the "Alcestis" of Euripides;
an Epithalamium on the marriage of poor Mary Stuart, noble and sincere,
however fantastic and pedantic, after the manner of the times; "Pomps,"
too, for her wedding, and for other public ceremonies, in which all the
heathen gods and goddesses figure; epigrams, panegyrics, satires, much of
which latter productions he would have consigned to the dust-heap in his
old age, had not his too fond friends persuaded him to republish the
follies and coarsenesses of his youth. He was now one of the most famous
scholars in Europe, and the intimate friend of all the great literary
men. Was he to go on to the end, die, and no more? Was he to sink into
the mere pedant; or, if he could not do that, into the mere court
versifier?

The wars of religion saved him, as they save