All this does not look very like a burning eagerness for posthumous fame, at all events of the kind that moves a certain class of people to leave money for hospitals, or almshouses, or learned foundations, to perpetuate names that would otherwise never have risen out of obscurity or escaped oblivion. As a matter of fact, Buchanan knew that he was celebrated, but no one had a poorer opinion of the work that had won him reputation than he had himself, not from the modesty of merit, as the common form carelessly puts it, but from the consciousness of merit, and because he felt that it was in him to do better. He hated the idea of having more celebrity than he deserved, and wanted to produce something that would show he was not an impostor or a quack. In short, he did not want more fame, but what he thought a better and honester title to the fame he had. That, however, is not the passion for fame, but simply self-respect, and an unselfish anxiety for the good name of those friends who had staked their reputation for taste and judgment on his ability for turning out the highest class of work. This is not the love of glory, but something better, although even if it were, it would not necessarily be either weak or wrong, provided the subject of it knew what he was doing in giving a rational scope to a natural impulse, and that he could and would give humanity something worth the prize of its praise. Buchanan himself tells us why he gave up the _Sphere_ and took up the _History_. It was primarily to gratify his friends, who thought that such a work was a want of the time, more useful and more suitable to Buchanan’s years than poetry; while he himself assures us, and there is no reason to doubt his declaration, that he desired to set before his royal pupil, James VI., the warnings and the encouragements derivable from the story of his predecessors on the throne, including his own ill-advised and ill-fated mother. It was no fault of Buchanan’s if James despised his teacher’s counsel, and, listening to flatterers, took up with the Divine Right doctrine, by impressing which on his unhappy son, both through precept and example, he virtually destined him to jump the life to come from the scaffold of Whitehall.