His most famous production as a poet, his version of the Hebrew Psalms, or rather series of poems based upon these, was certainly not written for fame. Every Humanist of eminence was expected to try his hand upon the Psalms, and when Buchanan found himself in Portugal under lock and key, at the instance of the Inquisition, among a set of monks, whom he hits off as equally good-natured and ignorant, and who had been told off to instruct him in orthodoxy, he addressed himself to a classic rendering of the Psalms with the double purpose of discharging his duty by his Humanistic Vocation, and doing something that might redeem his time and his temper from the boredom of the uncongenial society amidst which misfortune had placed him. There does not seem in all this much of that passionate desire of distinction to which Burns confesses. It is said, however, that fame was his object in commencing and carrying on his poem on the _Sphere_, which was undoubtedly planned on an elaborate and extensive scale. If fame was his desire, it was not a very consuming one, for he was five-and-twenty years at least over it, and left it unfinished at last, although goaded by friends to hasten its production. What does he say on the matter himself? Writing to Tycho Brahe in 1576, six years before his death, and more than twenty after he began to work at the _Sphere_, he says that bad health had compelled him, _spem scribendi carminis in posterum penitus abjicere_,--‘completely to abandon the hope of writing a poem for posterity.’ Three years afterwards, writing to a literary friend in England, who, like many others, kept dunning him for his promised books, and even for ‘copy,’ he says, with respect to his ‘astronomical’ aims in poetry, he had not so much voluntarily abandoned them, as been obliged reluctantly to submit to the deprivation of them; _neque enim aut nunc libet nugari, aut si maxime vellem per ætatem licet. Accessit eo historiæ scribendæ labor_,--‘for neither am I now greatly disposed for mere trifling, nor, were I never so much disposed, will my years allow it. Then in addition to my other difficulties there is the labour of writing my _History_’; the plain meaning being that as his years forbade him to do both the _History_ and the _Sphere_, he elected to go on with the _History_ and give up the _Sphere_, as a form of _nugari_ or ‘dilettantism.’