Buchanan’s life, like the lives of most people who have done anything worth speaking of in their time, divides itself roughly into two sections--the period of preparation, and the period of performance. What I shall call his period of performance, or at all events chief performance, was from the time when he finally returned to Scotland, after an absence abroad, with brief interruptions, of twenty-two years, and spent the remaining twenty-one years of his life in more or less intimate occupation with the public affairs of his country. On the 19th of August 1561, Queen Mary, then in her nineteenth year, landed at Leith, and was escorted to Holyrood by her enthusiastic subjects, by whom she was also serenaded at night in a style which, as the queen’s French retinue thought, showed more heart than art. Shortly before or after this date, Buchanan, now fifty-five years old, also appeared in Scotland, for his final settlement there. It is a curious coincidence that these two persons, eminent alike in their widely divergent spheres, and destined alternately to a literary friendship that was pleasant to both, and a political antagonism that was fatal to one of them, should have appeared on the scene of their sympathies and conflicts practically at the same time. I have said that the division of Buchanan’s life into a period of preparation and a period of performance is a rough division. By that I mean that what really deserves to be called performance could not be absolutely excluded from the preparation period, and that, to some extent, one stage of the performance period was often a preparation for the next; but taken with this qualification, the division is a sufficiently valid one.