The sudden and untimely death of Dr. Wallace has left this volume incomplete, and incapable of being completed as he would have done it. Detailed facts are in part awanting, but they are awanting in every biography and autobiography, and after the oblivion of centuries has passed over them, they tend to be unintelligible and uninteresting as lying remote from everyday experience. These, however, the inquiring reader, to his reasonable satisfaction, can find elsewhere; what he will never find elsewhere are Dr. Wallace’s ultimate, deliberate, critical estimates of the life and work of Buchanan. His book, as it grew under his nimble pen, grew, probably unconsciously, to be not so much an articulation of the bare bones of fact as a narrative of the genesis, evolution, growth, and vitality of Buchanan’s ideas, more especially his ideas affecting social democratic development, and in particular his capital heresy, dangerous for himself, but vital for the race, touching the ‘rights of man.’
Few men of any country have had such versatility of talent, and have in life found tasks so varied as George Buchanan and Robert Wallace. No other Scotsman known to me, through credible report or in the flesh, has had the personal experience that would enable him so well to understand and interpret the personal experience of George Buchanan. Both were pre-eminent in the university learning of their respective eras, which had little in common except Latin; scholastic logic and metaphysic being the dominating study of Buchanan’s days, as inductive positive science is of ours. Both were wandering scholars seeking for fortune, or at least for bread; each acting as tutor, schoolmaster, university professor, man of letters, theologian, politician, and teacher of public men who were too ignorant or too neglectful of honest rational principle to be fit to rule in mercy and in justice; both were doomed by circumstances or by conscience to poverty and the discrediting influences of poverty, though fit to furnish invaluable light and guidance to their fellow-men. Methinks the pre-Reformation church was a kinder, less harsh nursing-mother to the inquiring, doubting, hesitating, satirical Protestant, than the dry-as-dust nurses of ultra-Protestantism, agnosticism, atheism, and sincere worship of nothing except Mammon’s golden calf wereto the learned literary man of our day who, afflicted with distracting doubts himself, and many sorrows, could still give reasons for his faith in a supreme Creator and an administrator of the universe according to fixed law and unswerving right, and could help to lift the mind of his age out of a darkness deeper than Popery—the blackness of atheistic despair. Both knew about politics as revealed in the wrangling of churches or religious sects, and the strife of factions intriguing and fighting for power to govern or to misgovern. The politics familiar to Buchanan included the ethics that prompted and the arts that effected the murders of Cardinal Beaton, Rizzio, Darnley, Regent Moray, and Queen Mary, and that often imperilled his own life. Nevertheless, worn out by his years and assiduous labours, he died in his bed when his work was done, a fortnight after hisHistoryof his country was published, and before his old pupil the Scottish Solomon had time to discover all the treason it contained; ordered his servant to give his few last coins to a beggar, and left the care of his funeral to all whom it might concern on Christian, natural, civic, and sanitary grounds, ending his long, busy, chequered tenure of time with that courage and hope which gilds the last sunset of those who have striven to do right and never doubted that God is just.
There was no man in Scotland or in Europe that could have been of so much service to Scotland in guiding it through the troubles and storms, political, moral, and religious, of the Reformation as Buchanan, if the people of Scotland, more especially the feudal lords of Scotland, had been fit to follow the dictates of the broadest, most complete worldly wisdom, and of the clear conscience of one who had spent his years in study and in poverty, who had lived the life of a stranger to the entanglements of foolish pleasure and the illusions of earthly hope, who had the most of his possible life behind him and eternity in no distant prospect, and who had no conceivable motive to applaud murder or to tell lies. Sceptical by innate constitution, and educated to doubt in the schools of adversity and experience, personal and historical, he was not the man to commit himself hastily to faith in dark dogmas and half-explored truths; he was the man to be a cautious, judicious reformer, not the man to be an impetuous, frantic destroyer, too rash and unrestrained to discriminate between the entirely and partially unsound, too just to plunder churchmen, some of them profligate, in order to enrich feudal lords skilled in few arts except the arts of war and theft. Like Erasmus and Beza, he saw that the old order of society was dissolving; but, like all wise men,he preferred slow and gradual to revolutionary change.
John Knox, in point of culture and of pure intellect and reason, was a small man—a rash, daring, half-educated schoolboy, compared with Buchanan. Knowledge and reason are conservative forces, and Knox could not have been great had he not been a destroyer. His most indelible historical records are the ruins of cathedrals and other religious houses, ‘rooks’ nests’ requiring to be pulled down only in the judgment of blind superstition and rabid fanaticism. For the ignorance and savagery of the people of Scotland the Church of Rome was primarily to blame. That Church required reformation, moral and intellectual; but no spiritual entity, however corrupt, can be miraculously reformed by the destruction of Gothic or any other architecture which took its form under the sincere art and piety of buried generations. Cardinal Beaton’s mode of burning good true men to support and preserve the divine truth that had vitalised his Church for centuries was irrational and infernal; but it was not very much worse than the mad, destructive fury inspired by John Knox’s ‘excellent’ sermons, which, whatever their merits, can scarcely have emanated from a mind that had any clear comprehension of the processes by which spiritual truth makes its way and holds itspower effectively among mankind. Beaton and Knox were both powerful in their age and characteristic of it, but they would have found no conspicuous function in an age that was not in the course of emerging from the mire of savagery, with all its tendencies to violence and to vice. Both alike were uncompromising enemies of individual freedom, and equally bent upon the suppression of all conscientious opinions that did not concur with their own. Both were patriots, and of signal service to Scotland; but the evil they did so nearly counterbalances all the good they did (which might, and would, in time have been done by less unscrupulous, ungentle instruments), that it might have been well had Scotland been liberated by Providence from the piebald burden of both of them.[9]
Buchanan as a scholar was a very large inheritor of the wisdom of many ages, the largest inheritor ofthat rare kind of wealth of all the Scotsmen of his day. He was by nature somewhat of a sceptic, the teacher in Latin—and who can tell what beside?—of Montaigne—most candid and sincere of sceptics—by necessity a doubter, as true seekers of truth, especially in dark, troubled, fermenting ages, cannot help being. He was a philosopher—a Stoic probably, as most impecunious philosophers are compelled to be more or less, capable of bearing the inevitable with patience, and of waiting to solve difficulties by skill and cautious experiment rather than by violence or deceit! What his worldly wisdom and great intellectual power might have done for the good of his country opens up a wide field of conjecture touching the solution of most of the big problems of his age. Why should the clever, beautiful Queen Mary not have trusted him as an adviser rather than Scotch rakes and traitors and Italian fiddlers? Why should her race, more gifted than most royal races, have hugged a delusion about the Divine right of kings along the precipices overhanging death and ruin? Why should the Reformers, who had the means of ascertaining that among them he was a veritableSaul among the prophets, and neither a fanatic nor a hypocrite, not have utilised his wisdom and his inspiration of the beautiful and the true to direct the course and shape the limits of the Reformation, without proclaiming a barbarian, everlasting divorce between the power of truth and the beauty of holiness? Why should the spiritual force and illumination of every great man who did not wear fine raiment and fare sumptuously every day, of the prophets of Judæa and the sages of Greece and Rome, have been lost upon their contemporaries and left to find its way and its expanding efficacy in the slow course of centuries? Buchanan’s lot was the common lot of unendowed, and therefore unappreciated, genius. The greatest scholar and writer of his own country in his own time, one of the most potent of the intellectual aristocracy of Europe for all time, he was a rustic in dress, a plain, unpretentious, non-assertive inhabitant of the European villages called cities, known to him as St. Andrews and Edinburgh; a man pure of life in a vicious, half-decent age; loyal to truth so far as it was possible for him to discover it among contemporaries prone to falsehood and ready for the perpetration of it by forgery or any other effective and not unpracticable mode, he was esteemed a stranger in his native land, and not a Solon or a seer except bythe more cultured of his own unlettered generation; to subsequent vulgar generations he was so unknown or so forgotten as to fill, in their rude Temple of Fame, the niche of a mythical court-jester and coarse wit or witling; nevertheless he holds a title to lasting remembrance as sure as the story of the Reformation and the era of the never-to-be-forgotten Mary Stuart can give; also the unique distinction of being the greatest master of the Latin language since it died as a vernacular, and became the immortal medium of intercommunication for the wide, high, and cold republic of scholars and thinkers, scattered through realms of ether and cloudland, and lit by volcanic fire and spiritual aurora fitfully lifting the night from peaks of rock and ice.
FOOTNOTES[1]When I first heard from one of my early schoolmasters the mediæval chestnut,Quid distat inter sotum et Scotum?—Mensa tantum.(‘What divides a sot (fool) from a Scot?—Only the table’)—the reply was credited to Buchanan.[2]He was Buchanan’s assistant, and called the king’s ‘Pedagogue,’ Buchanan being called ‘Master.’[3]Certain emoluments arising to the feudal superior (in this case the king); which, as they depend on uncertain events, are termed casualties.[4]This covers the meaning more accurately than ‘Physicians.’[5]Burns appears to have afterwards written it down thus:—‘The Solemn League and CovenantNow brings a smile, now brings a tear;But sacred Freedom, too, was theirs:If thou’rt a slave, indulge thy sneer.’The form may be improved, the sentiment could not be.[6]My authority is Herkless’sCardinal Beaton, p. 153.[7]My non-forensic sympathy, but not my full conviction, goes with Mr. Hosack and Sir John Skelton in their chivalrous but too unmeasured defence of Mary. My verdict in regard to her being ‘art and part’ in putting an end to that traitor in heart and deed, the good-for-nothing, faithless fool Darnley, is a hesitant ‘Not Proven’; but if otherwise, then a distinct non-hesitant ‘served him right.’ Skelton’s clever, interesting book upon Maitland of Lethington, Mary’s most faithful and capable minister, does not throw much, if any, light upon Buchanan. In it he is treated as an opposition pleader, capable rather than scrupulous, who did not know all the facts, and who was instructed by men who had other purposes to serve than telling the whole truth, and who probably did not know it themselves so well as Skelton had opportunities to come to know it,e.g.in regard to the ‘Casket Letters’—documents that could be satisfactory to no modern tribunal except a Dreyfus court-martial. Buchanan’s attack, in a pamphlet written in Scotch, upon Skelton’s hero Maitland, entitledThe Chameleon, Skelton sneers at as a ‘Dawb’—not entirely an inaccurate criticism, forThe Chameleonis a caricature, and that, of course, means an exaggeration of all faults, actual or presumable. But when a ‘chameleon’ like Disraeli or Maitland, both of whom have found in John Skelton an ingenious and eloquent hero-worshipper, is assailed by satirists inPunchor elsewhere, the only effective condemnatory judgment worth stating is that the caricature is not recognisable by an honest enemy or a free and easy friend. For my part, I believe that the unvarnished truth, though perhaps not the whole of it, can be better inferred from Buchanan than from Skelton.[8]Sir David Brewster, when Principal of the United College of St. Leonard and St. Salvador, had a residence close to St. Leonard’s roofless church. In 1853, Sir David told to a breakfast-party of students, which included Dr. Wallace and the writer, that his house embraced all that existed of Buchanan’s old dwelling-house, and pointed out one particular part of the ancient outer wall thick enough to resist the artillery of Buchanan’s day. Dr. Johnson’s general contempt for Scotland, which did not keep silence in St. Andrews, could not resist the inspiration of thegenius lociof St. Leonard’s so far as to prevent his generously recognising Buchanan’s claim to immortality as being as fair as modern Latinity can give, and ‘perhaps fairer than the instability of vernacular languages admit.’[9]Carlyle’s estimate of Knox I accept and credit as the estimate of as penetrating an insight and as true a conscience as ever uttered the verdicts of history; but it is the estimate of a mind that could discover more to approve in the storm than in the sunshine, and who too readily infers noble motives from splendid results. I believe all the good he imputes to Knox and his life-battle for truth, and I don’t believe sufficiently in the vileness of human nature to believe in any of the charges of immorality which rival ecclesiastics have persisted in relating against him. But for all that, I am not blind to his human imperfections. I am far from thinking him to be a perfect man, much less a perfect Christian. His wild joy and unbridled merriment over the dying miseries of Cardinal Beaton and of Mary of Guise would be scarcely in harmony with the budding benevolence of a half-reformed cannibal. His virtues were genuine, and not hypocritical, but they were essentially Pagan virtues—gifts of nature, tested and strengthened, but not acquired, through his experiences as a notary and an ecclesiastic.
[1]When I first heard from one of my early schoolmasters the mediæval chestnut,Quid distat inter sotum et Scotum?—Mensa tantum.(‘What divides a sot (fool) from a Scot?—Only the table’)—the reply was credited to Buchanan.[2]He was Buchanan’s assistant, and called the king’s ‘Pedagogue,’ Buchanan being called ‘Master.’[3]Certain emoluments arising to the feudal superior (in this case the king); which, as they depend on uncertain events, are termed casualties.[4]This covers the meaning more accurately than ‘Physicians.’[5]Burns appears to have afterwards written it down thus:—‘The Solemn League and CovenantNow brings a smile, now brings a tear;But sacred Freedom, too, was theirs:If thou’rt a slave, indulge thy sneer.’The form may be improved, the sentiment could not be.[6]My authority is Herkless’sCardinal Beaton, p. 153.[7]My non-forensic sympathy, but not my full conviction, goes with Mr. Hosack and Sir John Skelton in their chivalrous but too unmeasured defence of Mary. My verdict in regard to her being ‘art and part’ in putting an end to that traitor in heart and deed, the good-for-nothing, faithless fool Darnley, is a hesitant ‘Not Proven’; but if otherwise, then a distinct non-hesitant ‘served him right.’ Skelton’s clever, interesting book upon Maitland of Lethington, Mary’s most faithful and capable minister, does not throw much, if any, light upon Buchanan. In it he is treated as an opposition pleader, capable rather than scrupulous, who did not know all the facts, and who was instructed by men who had other purposes to serve than telling the whole truth, and who probably did not know it themselves so well as Skelton had opportunities to come to know it,e.g.in regard to the ‘Casket Letters’—documents that could be satisfactory to no modern tribunal except a Dreyfus court-martial. Buchanan’s attack, in a pamphlet written in Scotch, upon Skelton’s hero Maitland, entitledThe Chameleon, Skelton sneers at as a ‘Dawb’—not entirely an inaccurate criticism, forThe Chameleonis a caricature, and that, of course, means an exaggeration of all faults, actual or presumable. But when a ‘chameleon’ like Disraeli or Maitland, both of whom have found in John Skelton an ingenious and eloquent hero-worshipper, is assailed by satirists inPunchor elsewhere, the only effective condemnatory judgment worth stating is that the caricature is not recognisable by an honest enemy or a free and easy friend. For my part, I believe that the unvarnished truth, though perhaps not the whole of it, can be better inferred from Buchanan than from Skelton.[8]Sir David Brewster, when Principal of the United College of St. Leonard and St. Salvador, had a residence close to St. Leonard’s roofless church. In 1853, Sir David told to a breakfast-party of students, which included Dr. Wallace and the writer, that his house embraced all that existed of Buchanan’s old dwelling-house, and pointed out one particular part of the ancient outer wall thick enough to resist the artillery of Buchanan’s day. Dr. Johnson’s general contempt for Scotland, which did not keep silence in St. Andrews, could not resist the inspiration of thegenius lociof St. Leonard’s so far as to prevent his generously recognising Buchanan’s claim to immortality as being as fair as modern Latinity can give, and ‘perhaps fairer than the instability of vernacular languages admit.’[9]Carlyle’s estimate of Knox I accept and credit as the estimate of as penetrating an insight and as true a conscience as ever uttered the verdicts of history; but it is the estimate of a mind that could discover more to approve in the storm than in the sunshine, and who too readily infers noble motives from splendid results. I believe all the good he imputes to Knox and his life-battle for truth, and I don’t believe sufficiently in the vileness of human nature to believe in any of the charges of immorality which rival ecclesiastics have persisted in relating against him. But for all that, I am not blind to his human imperfections. I am far from thinking him to be a perfect man, much less a perfect Christian. His wild joy and unbridled merriment over the dying miseries of Cardinal Beaton and of Mary of Guise would be scarcely in harmony with the budding benevolence of a half-reformed cannibal. His virtues were genuine, and not hypocritical, but they were essentially Pagan virtues—gifts of nature, tested and strengthened, but not acquired, through his experiences as a notary and an ecclesiastic.
[1]When I first heard from one of my early schoolmasters the mediæval chestnut,Quid distat inter sotum et Scotum?—Mensa tantum.(‘What divides a sot (fool) from a Scot?—Only the table’)—the reply was credited to Buchanan.
[2]He was Buchanan’s assistant, and called the king’s ‘Pedagogue,’ Buchanan being called ‘Master.’
[3]Certain emoluments arising to the feudal superior (in this case the king); which, as they depend on uncertain events, are termed casualties.
[4]This covers the meaning more accurately than ‘Physicians.’
[5]Burns appears to have afterwards written it down thus:—
‘The Solemn League and CovenantNow brings a smile, now brings a tear;But sacred Freedom, too, was theirs:If thou’rt a slave, indulge thy sneer.’
‘The Solemn League and CovenantNow brings a smile, now brings a tear;But sacred Freedom, too, was theirs:If thou’rt a slave, indulge thy sneer.’
The form may be improved, the sentiment could not be.
[6]My authority is Herkless’sCardinal Beaton, p. 153.
[7]My non-forensic sympathy, but not my full conviction, goes with Mr. Hosack and Sir John Skelton in their chivalrous but too unmeasured defence of Mary. My verdict in regard to her being ‘art and part’ in putting an end to that traitor in heart and deed, the good-for-nothing, faithless fool Darnley, is a hesitant ‘Not Proven’; but if otherwise, then a distinct non-hesitant ‘served him right.’ Skelton’s clever, interesting book upon Maitland of Lethington, Mary’s most faithful and capable minister, does not throw much, if any, light upon Buchanan. In it he is treated as an opposition pleader, capable rather than scrupulous, who did not know all the facts, and who was instructed by men who had other purposes to serve than telling the whole truth, and who probably did not know it themselves so well as Skelton had opportunities to come to know it,e.g.in regard to the ‘Casket Letters’—documents that could be satisfactory to no modern tribunal except a Dreyfus court-martial. Buchanan’s attack, in a pamphlet written in Scotch, upon Skelton’s hero Maitland, entitledThe Chameleon, Skelton sneers at as a ‘Dawb’—not entirely an inaccurate criticism, forThe Chameleonis a caricature, and that, of course, means an exaggeration of all faults, actual or presumable. But when a ‘chameleon’ like Disraeli or Maitland, both of whom have found in John Skelton an ingenious and eloquent hero-worshipper, is assailed by satirists inPunchor elsewhere, the only effective condemnatory judgment worth stating is that the caricature is not recognisable by an honest enemy or a free and easy friend. For my part, I believe that the unvarnished truth, though perhaps not the whole of it, can be better inferred from Buchanan than from Skelton.
[8]Sir David Brewster, when Principal of the United College of St. Leonard and St. Salvador, had a residence close to St. Leonard’s roofless church. In 1853, Sir David told to a breakfast-party of students, which included Dr. Wallace and the writer, that his house embraced all that existed of Buchanan’s old dwelling-house, and pointed out one particular part of the ancient outer wall thick enough to resist the artillery of Buchanan’s day. Dr. Johnson’s general contempt for Scotland, which did not keep silence in St. Andrews, could not resist the inspiration of thegenius lociof St. Leonard’s so far as to prevent his generously recognising Buchanan’s claim to immortality as being as fair as modern Latinity can give, and ‘perhaps fairer than the instability of vernacular languages admit.’
[9]Carlyle’s estimate of Knox I accept and credit as the estimate of as penetrating an insight and as true a conscience as ever uttered the verdicts of history; but it is the estimate of a mind that could discover more to approve in the storm than in the sunshine, and who too readily infers noble motives from splendid results. I believe all the good he imputes to Knox and his life-battle for truth, and I don’t believe sufficiently in the vileness of human nature to believe in any of the charges of immorality which rival ecclesiastics have persisted in relating against him. But for all that, I am not blind to his human imperfections. I am far from thinking him to be a perfect man, much less a perfect Christian. His wild joy and unbridled merriment over the dying miseries of Cardinal Beaton and of Mary of Guise would be scarcely in harmony with the budding benevolence of a half-reformed cannibal. His virtues were genuine, and not hypocritical, but they were essentially Pagan virtues—gifts of nature, tested and strengthened, but not acquired, through his experiences as a notary and an ecclesiastic.
‘We congratulate the publishers on the in every way attractive appearance of the first volume of their new series. The typography is everything that could be wished, and the binding is most tasteful.... We heartily congratulate author and publishers on the happy commencement of this admirable enterprise.’
‘One of the very best little books on Carlyle yet written, far outweighing in value some more pretentious works with which we are familiar.’
‘As an estimate of the Carlylean philosophy, and of Carlyle’s place in literature and his influence in the domains of morals, politics, and social ethics, the volume reveals not only care and fairness, but insight and a large capacity for original thought and judgment.’
‘Is distinctly creditable to the publishers, and worthy of a national series such as they have projected.’
‘The book is written in an able, masterly, and painstaking manner.’
‘It is not a patchwork picture, but one in which the writer, taking genuine interest in his subject, and bestowing conscientious pains on his task, has his materials well in hand, and has used them to produce a portrait that is both lifelike and well balanced.’
‘Presents a very interesting sketch of the life of the poet, as well as a well-balanced estimate and review of his works.’
‘The author has shown scholarship and much enthusiasm in his task.’
‘The kindly, vain, and pompous little wig-maker lives for us in Mr. Smeaton’s pages.’
‘A careful and intelligent study.’
‘It is a right good book and a right true biography.... There is a very fine sense of Hugh Miller’s greatness as a man and a Scotsman; there is also a fine choice of language in making it ours.’
‘Mr. Leask gives the reader a clear impression of the simplicity, and yet the greatness, of his hero, and the broad result of his life’s work is very plainly and carefully set forth. A short appreciation of his scientific labours, from the competent pen of Sir Archibald Geikie, and a useful bibliography of his works, complete a volume which is well worth reading for its own sake, and which forms a worthy instalment in an admirable series.’
‘Leaves on us a very vivid impression.’
‘A masterly delineation of those stirring times in Scotland, and of that famous Scot who helped so much to shape them.’
‘It is a concise, well written, and admirable narrative of the great Reformer’s life, and in its estimate of his character and work it is calm, dispassionate, and well balanced.... It is a welcome addition to our Knox literature.’
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‘Everybody who is acquainted with Mr. Taylor Innes’s exquisite lecture on Samuel Rutherford will feel instinctively that he is just the man to do justice to the great Reformer, who is more to Scotland ‘than any million of unblameable Scotsmen who need no forgiveness.’ His literary skill, his thorough acquaintance with Scottish ecclesiastical life, his religious insight, his chastened enthusiasm, have enabled the author to produce an excellent piece of work.... It is a noble and inspiring theme, and Mr. Taylor Innes has handled it to perfection.’
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