least Dr. Irving has rightly construed the "Testament Dative" which he
gives in his appendix--save arrears to the sum of 100 pounds of his
Crossraguel pension. We may believe as we choose the story in
Mackenzie's "Scotch Writers" that when he felt himself dying, he asked
his servant Young about the state of his funds, and finding he had not
enough to bury himself withal, ordered what he had to be given to the
poor, and said that if they did not choose to bury him they might let him
lie where he was, or cast him in a ditch, the matter was very little to
him. He was buried, it seems, at the expense of the city of Edinburgh,
in the Greyfriars' Churchyard--one says in a plain turf grave--among the
marble monuments which covered the bones of worse or meaner men; and
whether or not the "Throughstone" which, "sunk under the ground in the
Greyfriars," was raised and cleaned by the Council of Edinburgh in 1701,
was really George Buchanan's, the reigning powers troubled themselves
little for several generations where he lay.

For Buchanan's politics were too advanced for his age. Not only Catholic
Scotsmen, like Blackwood, Winzet, and Ninian, but Protestants, like Sir
Thomas Craig and Sir John Wemyss, could not stomach the "De Jure Regni."
They may have had some reason on their side. In the then anarchic state
of Scotland, organisation and unity under a common head may have been
more important than the assertion of popular rights. Be that as it may,
in 1584, only two years after his death, the Scots Parliament condemned
his Dialogue and History as untrue, and commanded all possessors of
copies to deliver them up, that they might be purged of "the offensive
and extraordinary matters" which they contained. The "De Jure Regni" was
again prohibited in Scotland, in 1664, even in manuscript; and in 1683,
the whole of Buchanan's political works had the honour of being burned by
the University of Oxford, in company with those of Milton, Languet, and
others, as "pernicious books, and damnable doctrines, destructive to the
sacred persons of Princes, their state and government, and of all human
society." And thus the seed which Buchanan had sown, and Milton had
watered--for the allegation that Milton borrowed from Buchanan is
probably true, and equally honourable to both--lay trampled into the
earth, and seemingly lifeless, till it tillered out, and blossomed, and
bore fruit to a good purpose, in the Revolution of 1688.

To Buchanan