BOOKS.

GEORGE BUCHANAN, HUMANIST AND REFORMER.*

OF the many eminent men that Scotland has produced, the- name of one only of those born before the eighteenth century- is known beyond the limits of this Island as that of a scholar- and a man of genius. But though it is to his Latin verses, and to them alone, that George Buchanan owes his unique reputation, yet in many respects he is worthy of a detailed biography. Not only were he and Roger Ascham the chief connecting links between the humanists of Great Britain and those of the Continent ; but they were the only two. real scholars—as scholarship was then understood—that Great Britain produced in the sixteenth century. But Buchanan was not a mere scholar. As a historian he attained a high reputation; as an educationist, if not in advance of his age he was certainly in the foremost rank, and though we cannot say that he originated anything, yet he readily adopted and advocated that reformed system of University studies which Sturm had established at Strasburg, and Baduel had promoted at Nismes. Moreover, in the last twenty years of his life, he played an important though secondary part in the public affairs of Church and State, and was highly esteemed as well for his abilities as for his integrity, • George Buchanan, Humanist and Reformer : a Biography. By P. Hume Brown. Edinburgh : David Douglas.

by the statesmen who had the chief government of Scotland from 1562 to 1582.

In Mr. Hume Brown's George Buchanan, Humanist and Reformer, we have for the first time an adequate biography of this distinguished man. The author has laboriously collected together all the facts of Buchanan's life so far as

they can be ascertained. He has given us ample details and judicious criticism on his various works; and where, as in the case of Buchanan's long residences at Paris and at Bordeaux, particular facts are not forthcoming, he affords us, what is specially valuable and interesting, accounts of contemporary University life and studies, which enable us thoroughly to understand and appreciate what we may call the social atmosphere in which Buchanan lived, and allow us to realise his mode of life there perhaps more clearly than any mere details of the facts of his history, if we could obtain them, would do.

David Irving's life of Buchanan, the second edition of which was given in 1817, is a most meritorious production, a model literary biography for the period at which it appeared. But no life of a scholar and reformer of the sixteenth century, written

in the first quarter of the nineteenth, can possibly be adequate having regard to the flood of light which during the last fifty years has been thrown on the civil, religions, and literary history of the time, light which has enabled Mr. Brown not only to supplement the facts of Buchanan's life, but to correct the not always sound views expressed by Irving, as well on the character of Buchanan as on other matters. Above all, Mr. Brown thoroughly appreciates the spirit of humanism of which George Buchanan was the eager disciple in France and the zealous apostle in Scotland, and he loses no opportunity

of insisting on the undoubted fact, not always, we think, borne in mind by Englishmen and Scotchmen, that though both a humanist and a reformer, George Buchanan was essentially a humanist first, and only a reformer afterwards. " His interests as the scholar of the Renaissance were stronger than his interests as the reformer of the corruptions of the Church." George Buchanan's life divides itself more sharply than that of any other man of letters of the time, into two portions.

For the first fifty-three years it was the common life of the scholar of the sixteenth century, to whom the writing of Latin, and especially of Latin verse, was an end and not a

means, and not an end only, but the end at which all culture aimed. Restlessly roaming, from city to city and from uni- versity to university, teaching sometimes as a private tutor, sometimes as a public lecturer or professor, alternately at Paris, where he spent, at different times, more than twenty years, Bordeaux, Coimbra, Edinburgh ; successively tutor to Lord James Stewart, the Earl of Cassius, and Timoleon de Cosse, having no love for teaching—if not like the younger Scaliger, absolutely detesting it—and adopting it only as a means of living, happy only when in France and enjoying the cultivated society of Paris and Bordeaux, ridiculing the clergy—and especially the Franciscans—and consequently disliked, and sometimes denounced as a heretic when he was only a humanist and a Gallio, he differed in only one respect

from the crowd of scholars, lecturers, and verse-writers of the sixteenth century in the fact that his Latin verses were incom- parably superior to those of most of his contemporaries.

From his return to Scotland in or about 1561, and thence- forth for the last twenty years of his life, all this is changed. The lively and even genial humanist is transformed into the stern reformer, the wandering professor into the moderator of the General Assembly of the Scottish Kirk, and the affectionate teacher of Timoleon de Cosse into the severe and irritable tutor of the young King James. The lover of France and its institutions has become a bitter opponent of the rights of Kings, and the elegiac and sometimes erotic poet, a diplomatist and a Latin secretary. But there is no room for charging Buchanan with insincerity in this great change. Until he was fifty years of age he does not seem to have given much thought to the subject of religion as a personal or spiritual matter :—

" During his last years in France, he for the first time began to make a serious study of the questions at issue between Rome and the Protestant reformers. His own words are so remarkable that they deserve to be quoted. These five years, he says, he mainly devoted to the study of the Bible in order that he might be able to form definite opinions for himself on the controversies which were then exercising the majority of men. These controversies, he proceeds, were now on the point of being settled at home, since the Scots had got rid of the tyranny of the Guises. Returning

thither, he gave in his adhesion to the Scottish Church. Till the very eve, therefore, of his final return to Scotland, and when he was already in his fifty-fifth year, we are bound to regard Buchanan as emphatically the product of the Renaissance, not of the Reformation."rne

Though a scholar and a man of letters, George Buchanan, notwithstanding his great reputation, was neither a man of learning nor a man of genius, neither a Casaubon nor a Scaliger. That he has left behind him no book of any living interest to the nineteenth century is common to him with most of the scholars of the sixteenth and seven- teenth centuries. But in fact, his writings contributed nothing in their own day to the advancement of learning or

to the sum of human knowledge, not even to the knowledge of classical antiquity. His History of Scotland shows in its earlier part that he was without the faintest idea of that historical criticism which at least attempts to weigh authorities and to discriminate between truth and fable ; while the later

and contemporary books, like his other prose writings, are little more than party pamphlets. Notwithstanding the praise lavished on his History by men of such eminence and capacity as de Thou, Usher, and Dryden, we incline to agree with Mr. Hill Burton that " it is of little more use and value than as a bulky exercise in the composition of classical Latin." But as a Latin writer, his style or " eloquence," as it was then called, is not easily surpassed. His version of the Psalms, and several others of his poems, place him in the first line of the writers of Latin verse of the sixteenth century—the equal of Vida and Sannazar, and both in verse and prose above any Frenchman of that age, except Muretus—while if he did not attain in verse to the exquisite grace and elegance of Muretus, or in prose to that perfect Ciceronian style of which the French scholar alone of the moderns is master, yet he is as superior to Muretus in substance, in vigour of expression, and in the good sense and human interest of what he writes, as he is inferior to him in form. Buchanan, though master of an admirable style, was in no sense like Muretus a mere master of style. He had distinctly something to say, and he said it at once with vigour and elegance, and if in his verses he sometimes

" Sports with Amaryllis in the shade, Or with the tangles of Netera's hair," it is only because it was the fashion of the verse-writers of the day to do so in their attempts at that imitation of the Roman

poets which seemed to them the highest imaginable form of

poetry. Mr. Brown has appraised his writings at their true value, and has judiciously characterised them :—

" Underlying all Buchanan's work, both prose and verse, there is the solid foundation of strong sense quickened by strong feeling, and this for Buchanan's age, with all its fatuous pedantries and affectations, is praise that can be estimated only after some acquaintance with his contemporary humanists. In his History of Scotland there is no suggestion of the great original thinker; but in the firm texture of its style, and the logical process of the narrative, we feel ourselves always in contact with a mind eminently sane, and a character bent on making itself felt on every page that he wrote. Verse, however, and not prose, was Buchanan's natural language. He tells us this himself, and there can be no doubt that he judged himself aright. The range of his poetical faculty is certainly remarkable. In Franciscanus we have humour as broad as that of The Jolly Beggars, and in his version of the Psalms there is a strain of spiritual feeling which not even its artificial form can wholly obscure. That he had a delicate play of fancy, both sportive and serious, many of his shorter pieces prove beyond a doubt ; and it is impossible to read his ode on the First of May, and not recognise that on occasion he had also at command the special note of the poetic imagination."

The bibliographical information which Mr. Brown gives us is

singularly meagre. For all editions of Buchanan's works up to 1715, he refers us to the " full bibliography " contained in Ruddiman's edition of that date ; but Ruddiman's list is neither complete nor exact, and though we are told in Mr. Brown's preface that editions of Buchanan's works " that have appeared since 1715 are specified as the works themselves come up for

notice," this promise is certainly not performed. We have been unable to find any reference to any edition either of Buchanan's version of the Psalms, or indeed of any other of his poems, that has appeared since 1715 ; and even where mention is made of the recent editions, this is done in so vague and cursory a manner as to afford no information of any value or interest. Nor are we told what is the best edition, either of the works generally, or of any single produc-

tion. At least a few words should have given us Mr. Brown's opinion on the respective merits of the two editions of the works of Buchanan—that of Ruddiman of 1715, and that of Burmann of 1725—while as Mr. Mackay, in his life of Buchanan in the Dictionary of National Biography, has cited an edition of 1735, we should have expected some notice of this edition, if, indeed, it really exists, and if the date is not as we suspect, a misprint for 1725. We have still to refer to Irving's Life for the only notice, so far as we know, of the differences between, and the respective merits of the editions of 1715 and 1725. To Irving, again, we must have recourse for a useful list of publications relating to Buchanan, of several of which—notably Love's " Vindication of Mr. George Buchanan from the aspersions cast on him by Camden, and from the horrible ingratitude he is charged with to Queen Mary "—we are surprised to find no mention made by Mr. Brown. Nor have we noticed any reference to the books which Buchanan is said to have presented to St. Leonard's College, and of which Irving thought that he had identified nine, several of them enriched with marginal notes in Buchanan's own handwriting.

Without agreeing with all Mr. Brown's conclusions, or with all his statements of fact, especially in minor details, we can heartily recommend his book to all who wish to make them- selves acquainted with the history of humanism in the six- teenth century. To Englishmen and Scotchmen, George Buchanan will always be an interesting personality, but the notices which Mr. Brown gives us of many of his contem- poraries adds greatly to the value of his work, which is a scholarly contribution to the history of the Renaissance in France and Scotland.