This discussion arose in our endeavour to determine Buchanan’s character so far as money-making was concerned. He was no money-maker. _Contemptis opibus_--‘despising wealth’--is, as we have seen, Joseph Scaliger’s account of him, meaning thereby that personally he did not care for more money than would maintain the much other than money-making career which he liked, and had set his heart on, keeping himself independent by the labour of a scholar, but not hesitating to ask payment, when he wanted it, from a society that was morally indebted to him. His indifference, however, to wealth as a life-object must not be confounded with the counsel of the ascetic preacher who urges his hearers to forget the present world in thoughts of the world to come, and wins, perhaps, a better living by an eloquent and pessimistic sermon on the text which says that ‘the love of money is the root of all evil.’ There is nothing to show that Buchanan did not hold, with all sensible people, that there is a sense in which the love of money is the root of all good, inasmuch as it is the men of strong cupidity who organise industry and commerce, thereby laying that foundation of material wealth without which there can be no superstructure of leisured thought, learning, or art, acting, it may be, only as the dray-horses of civilisation--some of them, of course, are a good deal more--but worthy of all the corn they consume, although were one desirous of exchanging ideas, it would not be to their sumptuous stables that he would resort. Neither does he appear to have set his heart upon the ordinary objects of ambition, in the shape of fame or power. ‘Dear is fame to the rhyming tribe.’ ‘That dearest wish of every poetic bosom--to be distinguished,’ said Burns in his preface to the first edition of his poems, and he, if any one, was entitled to speak. But in the same preface he also says that to amuse himself amidst toil, to transcribe the feelings in his own breast, to find some counterpoise to the struggles of a world alien and uncouth to the poetic mind--‘these were his motives for courting the Muses, and in these he found Poetry to be its own reward.’ In other words, the poet may desire fame and distinction for what he has done, yet it need not have been the desire of fame and distinction that made him do it. Buchanan seems to have been even more self-controlled or more indifferent than this account of matters might imply. His numerous efforts had won him the highest reputation, but he had taken no pains to advertise himself. He had handed his productions here and there to friends who wished to see them, and it was only the solicitation of those friends that prevented his consigning to everlasting obscurity some of the brightest things he, or indeed any one else, ever wrote.