Hence every man who looked to be a worker in literature or science, threw himself into the academic practice of cultivating the familiar use of the Latin language. To the Scottish scholars it was almost a revived language, and they possessed as great a command over it as can ever be obtained of a language confined to a class, and not universally used by the lowest as well as the highest of the people. Hence, when he had the pen in hand, the educated Scotsman felt the Latin come more naturally to his call than the vernacular; and people accustomed to rummage among old letters by Scotsmen will have sometimes noticed that the writer, beginning with his native tongue, slips gradually into the employment of Latin as a relief, just as we may find a foreigner abandon the arduous labour of breaking English, to repose himself in the easy fluency of his natural speech. We believe that no language, employed only by a class, is capable of the same copiousness and flexibility as that which is necessarily applicable to all purposes, from the meanest to the highest. But such as a class-language could become, the Latin was among the Scots; and it is to their peculiar position and academic practices that, among a host of distinguished humanists, we possess in George Buchanan the most illustrious writer in the Roman tongue, both in poetry and prose, since the best days of Rome. The records before us afford some amusing instances of the anxious zeal with which any lapse into the vernacular tongue was prevented, and conversation among the students was rendered as uneasy and unpleasant as possible. In the visitorial regulations of King’s College, Aberdeen, in 1546, it is provided that the attendant boys—the gyps, if we may so call them—shall be expert in the use of Latin, lest they should give occasion to the masters or students to have recourse to the vernacular speech: “_Ne dent occasionem magistris et Studentibus lingua vernacula uti._” If Aberdeen supplied a considerable number of waiting-boys thus accomplished, the stranger wandering to that far northern region, in the seventeenth century, might have been as much astonished as the man in _Ignoramus_, who tested the state of education in Paris by finding that even the dirty boys in the streets were taught French. It would, after all, have perhaps been more difficult to find waiting-boys who could speak English. The term by which they are described is a curious indication of the French habits and traditions of the northern universities: they are spoken of as _garciones_—a word of obvious origin to any one who has been in a French hotel.