There is a weird humour in the famous interview between himself on the one hand and the Melvilles, Andrew and James, on the other, who had crossed from St. Andrews to Edinburgh to see him shortly before he passed away. They found him teaching his young attendant his _a b, ab_. Andrew Melville, amused by the spectacle of the greatest scholar in Europe engaged in so disproportionate a task, made a suitable observation. ‘Better this than stealing sheep,’ quoth Buchanan, or ‘than being idill,’ he added, which latter he maintained to be as bad as the stealing of sheep. Then the conversation wandered to his _History_, which was by this time in the hands of the printer. The Melvilles noticed in the proofs the well-known and ugly story of Mary’s having got Rizzio’s body removed to the tomb of James V. They suggested that the king might take offence at this reflection on his mother’s memory, and that the publication might be stopped. ‘Tell me,’ said the dying historian, ‘if it is true.’ They said they thought so. ‘Then I will bide his feud, and all his kin’s,’ was the answer. There was, no doubt, a dash of the heroic in this, but there was a chuckle in it too, as the speaker reflected that the king who had neglected him, and whom he had flogged for persistent boyish insolence, according to the pedagogic fashion of the time, would once more have his pride humbled at his hands when he was gone. No story was better known in Scotland than his correction of the king, and his now unrepeatable sarcasm in reply to the Countess of Mar’s haughty demand how he, a mere man of learning, could dare to lift his hand upon the Lord’s anointed. It tickled the popular mind, and along with other reports of Buchanan’s fun--for it is not to be supposed that his table-talk with the Scaligers, or even with Knox, was wholly funereal in character--indeed we know it was not--formed a sort of Buchanan myth, to which every witling who thought he had invented a good thing, and wanted to get it listened to by fathering it on a well-known name--a device not yet extinct--would contribute further bulk, although not more ornament. In this way an idea of Buchanan as a man of mirth and facetiousness[1] would take root and spread in the public consciousness, and as the people could not get at the real Buchanan for his Latin, they formed a picture of him according to their own uncivilised conceptions. Hence the chapbooks--a hideous reflection from a cracked and distorted mirror, but still showing that there was something to reflect. Such was Buchanan, political thinker, practical statesman, poet, scholar, historian, controversialist, humorist, and great in all these diverse directions--certainly a personality worth knowing in greater detail. CHAPTER II CHARACTERISTICS