This is not the stage at which to describe the books themselves--it is their prefaces that make them relevant at present,--but a word to indicate their general character is necessary. The _Baptistes_ was written (1540-41) when Buchanan was comparatively a young man, thirty-four or thirty-five, and was ‘regenting’ in a great secondary school or gymnasium at Bordeaux, called the Collège de Guyenne, organised and presided over by one André de Gouvéa, a famous Portuguese Humanist and educator of the day. This _Baptistes_ was simply a dramatic reproduction of the story of John the Baptist and his tragic end, the _dramatis personæ_ being King Herod, Queen Herodias, the latter’s dancing daughter, Malchus the high priest, Gamaliel, and the unlucky John himself. It was composed, Buchanan tells us in the dedicatory preface and in his autobiography (1574), in accordance with the rules of the college, and intended by him to win the students, who acted it, from the silly ‘mysteries’ of the monks to the imitation of classic antiquity, and the rising study of religion in its original documents. But there was something more intended. It is scarcely necessary to read ‘between the lines’ to find a complete condemnation of absolutist tyranny, and a picture of the misery which it brings on the tyrant himself as well as on his victims. This was not the kind of writing to please monarchs of the period. Nevertheless Buchanan dedicates it (1576) to the boy-king, as ‘having a peculiar appositeness to his position,’ warning him of ‘the agonisings and wretchedness which await tyrants, even when they seem to be most flourishing outwardly.’