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
Scotsmen, 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 as 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