GEORGE BUCHANAN I EORGE BUCHANAN was the type and GE exemplar of the wandering Scot. He was of the adventurous band which once made its country's name glorious for arms and arts from one end of Europe to another. If the hard life of an inhospitable land sent forth the many profound scholars and brave soldiers who taught and fought wherever there was a professor's rostrum or a field of battle, the kindlier soil of France or High Germany encouraged the growth both of learning and courage. The Scots abroad proved themselves as nimble with their swords as with their brains. They were as ready to enter a quarrel as to begin an argument. Fier comme ung Escossois passed into a commonplace; and it is not surprising, when we remember how quick to anger and valiant in combat were the heroes of the sixteenth century. There was Thomas Dempster, for instance, who not only professed the humanities at Toulouse and Paris, at Pisa and Bologna, but who was so stout a man of his hands that he once made prisoners three soldiers sent to castigate him. And there was Francis Sinclair, who fought mathematically, and mathematicised like a soldier. And there was James Crichton, Scotus Admirabilis, whose prowess in the schools and in the tourney has been celebrated by the most eloquent of his compatriots, and who for three centuries has inhabited the gracious realm of romance. Thus from the Netherlands to Muscovy the Scots met the scholars of all nations on equal terms. The world, sharply divided by politics, knew no boundaries of intelligence, and as Latin was the universal language, human intercourse was not hindered by diversity of speech. There was no essential difference, save in the quality of the professors, between the colleges of Scotland and France. And George Buchanan, in leaving his own land, changed neither his tongue nor the course of his instruction. Born in 1506, of a family that was more ancient than rich, he lost his father in early youth, and was sent by an uncle to Paris in 1520; and thus he began the life of a wandering scholar, which ceased only with his final return to Scotland after forty adventurous years. The Paris to which he came was the last stronghold of scholasticism. The new learning had not yet crossed the Alps, and the study of Greek, which Erasmus had carried to Cambridge twenty years before, was still regarded in Paris as pestilent and heretical. But Buchanan was not checked on the road of scholarship by the scruples of faith. Already profoundly versed in the reading and writing of Latin, he presently taught himself Greek, and, when the years had matured his talent, his knowledge of the classical tongues was unrivalled in France. Meanwhile his ardour for learning had suffered a check. In 1522 his uncle died, and poverty sent him back to Scotland for a while. Here he took part in the Duke of Albany's hapless expedition against England, and won that acquaintance with warfare which well became the scholars of his time. A year later he visited St. Andrews, that he might sit at the feet of John Major, who, to cite Buchanan's own words, 'tum ibi dialecticen, aut verius sophisticen, in extrema senectute docebat.' That Buchanan ever had much sympathy with the system of John Major, the last and greatest of the schoolmen, is unlikely, and before long he became one of the old professor's bitterest opponents. But his sojourn at St. Andrews taught him the worst of the ancient method, and inspired the lines which, together with Rabelais' contemptuous reference, keep alive the fame and name of Major. Among the books which Pantagruel found in the library of St. Victor was Major's treatise De modo faciendi boudinos. Buchanan is more highly elaborate in his satire than Rabelais. Here is his epigram: 'Cum scateat nugis solo cognomine Major, F Buchanan, however, did not remain long in Scotland. In a few years he was back in Paris, living the hard life of a beggar-student, picking up a crust where he might, and engaged in a fierce tussle with fortune. And then increasing renown brought him prosperity. Not merely was he Regent at Ste. Barbe, the most highly enlightened college in Paris, but he held the honourable office of Procurator in the German Nation. Yet none knew better than he the penalties of scholarship. In the sixteenth as in the eighteenth century the reward of learning and poetry was 'toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail.' The deepest erudition was not enough to save a professor from neglect. Devotion to the classics was powerless against the indifference of loafing students. In an elegy on the miserable lot of those who taught the humanities in Paris, George Buchanan has described with much feeling the hardships which he himself suffered. At four o'clock a watchman aroused the college from a tardy and broken slumber. At five a bell sum moned the scholars to their work. Then there enters the master in cap and gown, his cane in one hand, his Virgil in the other: in vain he insists upon silence; in vain he expounds the text of the poet; the scholars sleep or look about them, complain of sickness or write their letters home. Then the master must needs use his rod, and the day, begun in sloth, is passed in tears. So the foolish round of sleep and toil is complete, |