leave the two lawful proprietors of these funds alone. So far as can be
made out, Mary's grant to Buchanan was almost identical in date with the
publication of the Psalms and the sonnet which he placed at their head:
a graceful and royal return for the compliment, quite in harmony with
the customs of the time. Both events occurred, as would appear, in the
year 1564, when all was still well with the unfortunate Queen.

Buchanan has been accused of great ingratitude to Mary, because at one
time he served and flattered her, and received as a recompense for the
incense he offered, a substantial benefit: but afterwards turned from
her party to that of her brother, and condemned her with unsparing blame
in his History, as well as acted against her after her downfall. But the
ingratitude is quite incapable of proof. To be devoted to a royal
personage in his or her youth, and to maintain unbroken, however he or
she may change, this early devotion through evil and through good
report, is a romantic grace which is given to few. It was given to very
few of those who received with enthusiasm the young Queen of Scotland,
when she came unsullied, with all her natural fascination and charm,
into the country which hoped everything from her, yet knew nothing of
her. After the half-dozen years of disaster and tragedy, of which a much
greater number of her people believed her the guilty cause than the
innocent victim, there were few indeed who maintained their faith. And
Buchanan was neither romantic nor young; he had none of the elements of
an enthusiast in him. A caustic man of the world, a self-absorbed
scholar without domestic ties or usage in the art of loving, it would
have been wonderful indeed had he constituted himself the champion of
his beautiful pupil in her terrible adversity because she had shown him
a little favour and he had laid poetical homages at her feet in a
brighter time. It would be hard indeed if such a passage of mutual good
offices were to bind a man's judgment for ever, and prevent him from
exercising the right of choosing whom he will serve to all time. Mary's
bounty would suffice to give to her tutor the independence which he had
struggled for all his life, if it had been paid; but it was not paid for
several years; and it was a bounty which cost the giver nothing, so that
the claim for eternal gratitude is overweening in any case.

At the same time, both then and ever, Buchanan's patron and backer was
the Lo