cholar and
the worthy goldsmith of the next generation, who did so much for the
boys of Edinburgh. Buchanan's best and most trustworthy biographer, Dr.
Irving,[5] pictures to his readers the sturdy young rustic trudging two
miles in all weathers to the parish school, with his "piece" in his
pocket, and already the sonorous harmonies of the great classic tongues
beginning to sound in his ears--a familiar picture which so many country
lads born to a more modest fame have emulated. In the parish school of
Killearn, in that ancient far-away Scotland before the Reformation,
which it is hard to realise, so different must it have been from the
characteristic Scotch school of all our traditions, the foundations of
Buchanan's great scholarship and power were laid. His father died while
he was still a mere child, and the future man of letters had plenty of
rough rustic work, helping his mother about the farm on the holidays,
which must have been more frequent while all the saints of the calendar
were still honoured. Trees of his planting, his biographer says, writing
in the beginning of this century, still grow upon the banks of the
little stream which runs by the beautiful ruins of Dunblane, and which
watered his mother's fields. When he had reached the age of fourteen an
uncle Heriot seeing his aptitude for study sent him off, it would seem
alone, in all his rusticity and homeliness, to Paris--a curious sign of
the close connection between Scotland and France--where he carried on
his studies or, a phrase more appropriate to his age, learned his
lessons amid the throngs of the French schools. Before he was sixteen,
however, his uncle died, leaving him desolate and unprovided for amongst
strangers; and the boy had to make his way home as best he could, half
begging, half working his passage, stopping perhaps here and there to
help a schoolboy or to write a letter for the unlearned, and earning a
bed and a meal as poor scholars were used to do. He remained a year in
his mother's house, but probably was no longer wanted for the uses of
the farm, since his next move was to the wars. He himself informs us in
the sketch of his life which he wrote in his old age that he was "moved
with a desire to study military matters," a desire by no means unusual
at seventeen. These were the days when the fantastic French Albany was
at the head of affairs in Scotland, during the childhood of James V, and
the country was in great disorder, torn with p