trouble of spirit, change this mortal and miserable life, for that happy and immortal life that shall never have an end.” Having, for some time before, given orders for making his coffin, be rose out of bed (November 24) about ten o'clock, and put on his hose: and doublet, and sat up about the space of half an hour, and then returne ed to bed again. Being asked by Kingincleugh, if he had any pain? I answered, "no pain, but such as, trust, will soon put an end to this baie. yea, I do not esteem that pain to me, which is the beginning of eternal joy." In the afternoon he caused his wife to read the 15th chapter of Ist Corinthians. When it was ended, he said, “is not that a comfort. able chapter?" A little after, "I commend my soul, spirit, and body, into thy hands, O Lord!" About five o'clock at night, he said to his wife, "go, read where I cast my first anchor." This was the 17th chapter of John; which she read, together with part of Calvin's sermons ca the Ephesians. They then went to prayer; after which Dr Preston asked him, if he heard the prayer? he answered, "would to God that you and all men had heard it as I have done; I praise God for that heavenly sound;" adding, " Lord Jesus receive my spirit." His servant Richard Bannatyne, hearing him give a long sigh, said, "now, Sir, the time you have long called to God for, doth instantly come; and, seeing all na tural powers fail, give us some sign, that you live upon the comfortable promises, which you have so often shewed us." At this speech he lifted up one of his hands; and immediately after, without any struggle, as ore falling asleep, he departed this life, about eleven o'clock at night, finishing his Christian warfare: he entered into the joy of his Lord, to receive a crown of righteousness, prepared for him, and such as him, from before the foundation of the world. He was buried in the church-yard of St. Giles, now that square called the Parliament-Close, upon Wednesday the 26th of November. His funeral was attended by the Earl of Morton, Regent, other Lords, and a great multitude of people of all ranks. When he was laid in the grove, the Earl of Morton said, "There lies a man, who, in his life, never feared the face of man who hath been often threatened with dag and dagger, but hath ended his days in peace and honour.” He was low in stature, and of a weakly constitution; which made Mr. Thomas Smeaton, one of his contemporaries, say: "I know not it ever God placed a more godly and great spirit in a body so little and frail. I am certain, that there can scarcely be found another, in whom more gifts of the Holy Ghost, for the comfort of the church of Scotland, did shine. No one spared himself less; no one more diligent in the charge committed to him; and yet no one was more the object of the hat red of wicked men, and more vexed with the reproach of evil speakers: but this was so far from abating, that it rather strengthened his courage and resolution in the ways of God." Beza calls him the great apostle of the Scots. His faithfulness in reproving sin, shewed he was not to be awed by the fear of man, made up the most remarkable part of his cha racter; and the success wherewith the Lord blessed his labours, was very singular, and is enough to stop the mouth of every enemy against him. His works are, an Admonition to England; an Application to the Scots Nobility &c.; a Letter to Mary the Queen Regent; a History of the Reformation; a Treatise on Predestination; the First and Second Blast of the Trumpet; a Sermon preached, August 1565, on account of which he was for me time prohibed from preaching. He left also sundry manuscripts, sermons, tracts, &c. which have never been printed. MR. GEORGE BUCHANAN. GEORGE BUCHANAN was born in Lennoxshire, commonly called the sherufdo of Du nbarton, in Scotland, in a country town, situated near the river or water of Blane, in 1506, about the beginning of February, of a family rather ancient than rich. His father died of the stone, in the flower of his age, whilst his grandfather was yet alive; by whose extravagance, the family, which was but low before, was now almost reduced to the extremity of want; yet such was the frugal care of his mother, Agnes Herriot, that she brought up five sons and three daughters to men's and women's estate. Of the five sons, George was one His uncle, James Herriot, perceiving his promising ingenuity in their own country schools, took him from thence, and sent him to Paris. There he applied himself to his studies, and especially to poetry; having partly a natural genius that way, and partly out of necessity, because it was the only method of study propounded to him in his youth. Before he had been there two years, his uncle died, and he himself fell dangerously sick; and being in extreme want, was forced to go home to his friends. After his return to Scotland, he spent almost a year in taking care of his health; then he went into the army with some French auxiliaries, newly arrived in Scotland, to learn the military art. But that expedition proving fruitless, and those forces being reduced by the deep snow of a very severe winter, he relapsed into such an illness, as confined him all that season to his bed. Early in the spring, he was sent to St. Andrews, to hear the lectures of John Major; who, though very old, read logic, or rather sophistry, in that university. The summer after, he accompanied him into France; and there he fell into the troubles of the Lutheran sect, which then began to increase. He struggled with the difficulties of fortune almost two years, and at last was admitted into the Barbaran college, where he was grammar professor almost three years. During that time, Gilbert Kennedy, Earl of Cassillis, one of the young Scottish nobles, being in that country, was much taken with his ingenuity and acquaintance; so that he entertained him for five years, and brought him back with him into Scotland. Afterwards, having a mind to return to Paris to his old studies, he was detained by the King, and made tutor to James, his natural son. In the mean time, an elegy made by him, at leisure times, came in o the hands of the Franciscans; wherein he writes, that he was solicited in a dream, by St. Francis, to enter into his order. In this poem, there were one or two passages that reflected on them very severely; which those ghostly fathers, notwithstanding their profession of meekness and humility, took more heinously, than men, having obtained such a vogue for piety among the vulgar, ought to have done, upon so small an occasion of offence. But finding no just grounds for their unbounded fury, they attacked him upon the score of religion; which was their common way of terrifying those they did not wish well to. Thus, whilst they indulged their impotent malice, they made him, who was not well affected to them before, a greater enemy to their licentiousness, and rendered him more inclinable to the Lutheran cause. In the mean time, the King, with Magdalen his wife, came from France, not without the resentment of the priesthood; Spottiswood says he was born within the parish of Killearn, and house of Dru makill History, P. 325. $6 who were afraid that the royal lady, having been bred up under her aunt, Next, there arose jealousies at Court about some of the nobility, who were thought to have conspired against the King; and in that matter, the King being persuaded the Franciscans dealt insincerely, he commanded Buchanan, who was then at Court, though he was ignorant of the disgusts between him and that order, to write a satire upon them. He was loath to offend either of them; and, therefore, though he made a poem, yet it was but short, and such as might admit of a doubtful inwherein he satisfied neither party; not the King, who would terpretation, have had a sharp and stinging invective; nor the fathers neither, who looked on it as a capital offence, to have any thing said of them but what was honourable. So that receiving a second command to write more pungently against them, he began that miscellany, which now bears the title of The Franciscan, and gave it to the King. But shortly after, being made acquainted by his friends at Court, that Cardinal Beaton sought his life, and had offered the King a sum of money, as a price for his head, he escaped out of prison, and fled for England. But there also, things were at such an uncertainty, that the very same day, and almost with one and the same fire, the men o both factions, Protestants and Papists, were burnt; Henry VIII. in his old age, being more intent on his own security, than the purity or reformation of religion. This uncertainty of affairs in England, seconded by his ancient acquaintance with the French, and the courtesy natural to them, drew him again into that kingdom. As soon as he came to Paris, he found Cardinal Beaton, his utter enemy, ambassador there; so that, to withdraw himself from his fury, the invitation of Andrew Govean, he went to Bourdeaux. There he taught three years in the schools, which were erected at the public cost. In that time he composed four tragedies, which were afterwards occasionally published. But that which he wrote first, called The Baptist, was printed last, and next the Medea of Euripedes. He wrote them in com pliance with the custom of the school, which was to have a play written once a-year, that the acting of them might wean the French youth from allegories, to which they had taken a false taste, and bring them back, as much as possible, to a just imitation of the ancients. This affair succeeding even almost beyond his hopes, he took more pains in compiling the other two tragedies, called Jephtha and Alcestes; because he thought they would fall under a severer scrutiny of the learned. And yet, during this time, he was not wholly free from trouble, being harassed with the menaces of the Cardinal on the one side, and of the Franciscans on the other: for the Cardinal had wrote letters to the Archbishop of Bour deaux, to apprehend him; but, providentially, those letters fell into the hands of Buchanan's best friends. However, the death of the King of Scots, and the plague, which then raged over all Aquitain, dispelled that fear. In the interim, an express came to Govean from the King of Portugal, in the Greek and Latin tongues; that they might read the liberal arts, and especially the principles of the Aristotelian philosophy, in those schools which he was then building with a great deal of care and expense. Buchanan, being addressed, readily consented to go for one. For whereas he saw that all Europe besides, was either actually in foreign or domestic wars, or just upon the point of being so, that one corner of the world was, in his opinion, likeliest to be free from tumults and combustions; and besides, his companions in that journey were such, that they seemed rather his acquaintances and familiar friends, than strangers or aliens to him: for many of them had been his intimates for several years, and are well known to the world by their learned works, as Micholaus Gruchius, Gulielmus Garentaeus, Jacobus Tevius, and Elias Venetus. This was the reason that he did not only make one of their society, but also persuaded a brother of his, called Patrick, to do the same. And truly the matter succeeded excellently well at first; till, in the midst of the enterprise, Andrew Govean was taken away by a sudden death, which proved mighty prejudicial to his companions: for, after his de cease, all their enemies endeavoured first to ensnare them by treachery, and soon after ran violently upon them as it were with open mouth; and their agents and instruments, being great enemies to the accused, they laid hold of three of them, and haled them to prison; whence, after a long and loathsome confinement, they were called out to give in their answers; and, after many bitter taunts, were remanded to prison again; and yet no accuser did appear in court against them. As for Buchanan, they insulted most bitterly over him, as being a stranger; and knowing also, that he had very few friends in that country, who would either rejoice in his prosperity, sympathize with his grief, or revenge the wrongs offered to him. The crime laid to his charge was the poem he wrote against the Franciscans; which he himself, before he went from France, took care to get excused to the King of Portugal; neither did his accusers perfectly know what it was, for he had given but one copy of it to the King of Scots, by whose command he wrote it. Thay farther objected his eating of flesh in Lent ;" though there is not a man in all Spain but uses the same liberty. Besides, he had given some sly sideblows to the monks; which, however, nobody but a monk himself could well except against. Moreover, they took it heinously ill, that, in a certain familiar discourse with some young Portuguese gentlemen, upon mention made of the eucharist, he should affirm, that, in his judgment, Austin was more inclinable to the party condemned by the church of Rome. Two other per sons (as some years after came to his knowledge, viz. John Tolpin, a Norman, and John Ferrerius of Sub-alpine Liguria) had witnessed against him, that they had heard, from divers creditable persons, "That Buchanan was not orthodox as to the Roman faith and religion." But to return to the matter: after the inquisitors had wearied both themselves and him for almost half a year, at last, that they might not seem to have causelessly vexed a man of some name and note in the world, they shut him up in a monastery for some months; there to be more exactly disciplined and instructed by the menks; who, to give them their due, though very ignorant in all matters of religion, were men otherwise neither bad in their morals, nor rude in their behaviour. This was the time he took to form the principal pf David's Psalms into Latin verse. At last he was set at liberty for a pass, and accommodations from the crown, to return into France, the Ki g desired him to stay where he was; and allotted him a small sum for daily necessaries and pocket expenses, till some better provision might be made for his subsistence. But he, tired out with delay, as being put off to no certain time, nor on any sure grounds of hope; and having got the opportunity of a passage in a ship then riding in the bay of Lisbon, was carried over into England. He made no longer stay in that country, though fair offers were made him there; for he saw that all things were in a hurry and combustion, under a very young King; the nobles at variance one with another; and the minds of the commons yet in a ferment, upon the account of their civil combustions. Whereupon he returned into France, about the time that the siege of Metz was raised. There he was in a manner compelled by his friends to write a poem concerning that siege; which he did, though somewhat unwillingly, because he was loath to interfere with several of his acquaintances, and especially with Mellinus Sangelasius, who had composed a learned and elegant poem on that subject. From thence he was called over into Italy, by Charles de Cosse of Brescia, who then managed matters with very good success in the Gallic and Ligustic countries about the Po. He lived with him and his son Timoleon, sometimes in Italy, and sometimes in France, the space of five years, till the year 1560; the greatest part of which time he spent in the study of the holy scriptures, that so he might be able to make a more exact judgment of the controversies in religion, which employed the thoughts, and took up all the time, of most of the men of these days. It is true, these disputes were silenced a little in Scotland, when that kingdom was freed from the tyranny of the Guises of France; so he returned thither, and became a member of the church of Scotland, 1560.* Some of his writings, in former times, being, as it were, redeemed from shipwreck, were by him collected and published. The rest, which were scattered up and down in the hands of his friends, he committed to the disposal of Providence.+ After his return, he professed philosophy in St. Andrews; and in the year 1565, he was appointed tutor to James VI. King of Scotland; and in 1568, went with the Regent to the Court of England; at which time and place he did no small honour to his country. Sir James Melvill, in his Memoirs, p. 234, gives him the following character." He was a Stoic philosopher, who looked not far before him; too easy in his old age; somewhat revengeful against those who had offended him:" but notwithstanding, a man of notable endowments, great learning, and an excellent Latin poet; he was much ho 66 A little before his death, he returned home from Court to visit his friends; during which time King James sent him several messages; and, at last, a threatening letter to return in twenty days. But he, finding his death approaching, sent him back a letter of admonition relative to the government of his kingdom, and well-being of his council; and told him, that he could run the hazard of his Majesty's displeasure without danger; for that," by the time limited, he would be where few kings or great men should be honoured to enter." At reading which, it is said. the King wept His works that are now extant, make two folio volumes. His treatise, DE JURE REGNI APUD Scoros, was co: demned by act of parliament, about two years after his death; which happened at Edinburgh, or September 28. 1582. These pamphlets going under the name of the Witty Exploits of George Buchanan seem to be spurious; al though, it is true, he pronounced many witty expressions, of which a great number never were commited to writing. |