Buchanan’s friends seem to have tried to tempt him to undertake the _History_ by representing that no subject was _aut uberius ad laudem, aut firmius ad memoriæ conservandam diuturnitatem_,--‘better fitted to win him renown or prolong his memory.’ It is not on the strength of such hopes, however, that he describes himself as working. It was, by his own account, only the shame of leaving unfinished a task he had engaged himself to his friends to perform that made him persevere at a labour which, he says, _in ætate integra permolestus, nunc vero in hac meditatione mortis, inter mortalitatis metum, et desinendi pudorem, non potest non lentus esse et ingratus, quando nec cessare licet, nec progredi lubet_,--‘would, even in the flower of my age, have been a burden, but now, in contemplation of my end, what between the dread of death interrupting me before I am done, and the shame there would be in abandoning my undertaking, I neither find myself free to stop, nor feel any pleasure in going on.’ Not much there of glory for himself, although something of an heroic devotion to the claims of friendship and the call of duty! CHAPTER III CHARACTERISTICS--(_continued_) _Did not seek power_ Scaliger’s ascription to Buchanan of a spirit superior to the temptations of wealth and fame seems thus fairly well justified; but what of his further claim that he was insensible to ambition? He rose to be the foremost Latin poet and man of letters, or indeed poet and man of letters of any kind in his day, and to the highest positions, political, ecclesiastical, educational, in his native land. Did he reach all this without aiming at it? Did it all come upon him unsolicited? Substantially, it would seem, that was so. The key to his plan of life, I believe, is to be found in the beginning of the short autobiography which he wrote (1580) in the third person, two years before his death, not from motives of egotism, but at the request of friends. He is stating how he came to be sent to the University of Paris when about fourteen, and then he says, _ibi cum studiis literarum, maxime carminibus scribendis, operam dedisset, partim naturæ impulsu, partim necessitate (quod hoc unum studiorum genus adolescentiæ proponebatur)_, etc.,--‘devoting himself there to literary studies, and chiefly to writing verses, partly from natural impulse and partly from necessity, that being the only sort of study open to youthful learners.’