If James turned out ‘the wisest fool in Christendom,’ the folly was not the fault of Buchanan, but of James’s nature, and perhaps also of flatterers of the ‘Mester Peter Young’ order, who scattered tares among the wheat of the more worthy sower. At all events he made James a scholar, if the latter made himself a pedant; and this implied, in the circumstances and the particular case, an exercise of firm and even stern discipline--of which a famous if not quite elegant instance has been quoted above,--and which was better fitted to improve the _morale_ of the pupil than the fortunes of the disciplinarian. As Melville puts it, Buchanan ‘held the king in awe,’ an awe which James felt and resented to the last, although, to do him justice, he also plumed himself on his training by an unrivalled scholar. Three works remarkable for their political teaching--his _Baptistes_, his _De Jure Regni_, and his _History_--Buchanan dedicated to James, in prefaces as remarkable as the works themselves. All three books were mainly, the second entirely, motived by the idea which Buchanan seems to have regarded as constituting and directing his true mission in life, namely, the unspeakable value of liberty, the constant possibility and deadly evil of tyranny, and the corresponding and always pressing duty of forestalling this possibility and resisting this evil by abundant proclamation and practice of the doctrine that legitimate political sovereignty exists only for the good and by the will of the people--a principle, of course, entirely subversive of the despotic doctrine of the Divine right of kings, so prevalent in usurpationist quarters in that day, and anticipatory of the modern and accepted democratic ‘platform’ of ‘Government of the People, by the People, for the People.’