This lesson, he goes on to say, he thinks ‘not only useful, but absolutely essential,’ for his royal pupil to learn now, so that he may ‘early begin to hate’ a fault which ‘he ought always to shun.’ Moreover, he ‘wishes to place it on record, for the information of posterity, that if the king should in the future, at the instigation of evil advisers, or by allowing the lust of power to overcome the principles of his education, act contrary to the warnings now given him, the blame must be laid, not on his teachers, but on himself, in not having listened to those who gave him good counsel.’ This was not the language of flattery; and though James was only ten when he was thus addressed, the precocity of his intelligence would enable him to understand its import. He was destined, in a very few years, to be king in fact as he was now in name, and Buchanan knew that if his charge turned out other than he was trying to make him--what actually happened--his own plain speaking would not be to his advantage. Knowing this, he did his duty, and had his sovereign for his enemy when the latter got used to being his own master. The fact reveals an elevation of character in Buchanan which cannot be justly forgotten in judging of him in other connections. It is not surprising that the agents in Scotland of Cecil, Queen Elizabeth’s great minister, when on the look-out for ‘Biencontents,’ as they were called, who might be dealt with in the way of bribery with a view to forming a strong Elizabethan party in Scotland, should have secretly reported (1579, King’s age thirteen) Buchanan as ‘a singular man,’ while of ‘Mester Peter Young’ they say that he was ‘specially well affected, and ready to persuade the king to be in favour of her majestye.’ Three years after dedicating the _Baptistes_ to James in the style we have seen, he dedicated the _De Jure_ to him (1579). This was a still bolder and more independent proceeding. Without entering, for the present, into the details of its argument, it may be enough to remember that, with its doctrine of Sovereignty as originating from the People, existing for their benefit, and not autocratic, but bounded by laws to which the People have consented, the _De Jure_ must have appeared to Absolutist and ‘Divine right people’ generally, revolutionary rubbish of the most pernicious description; and accordingly, in 1584, when Buchanan had been dead two years, they had it condemned and its publication and circulation forbidden by express Statute of the Scots Parliament--the King, of course, assenting, if not inciting; while, as we have already seen, the University of Oxford, later on, paid it the compliment of having it publicly burned. Buchanan must have, in a general way, foreseen the possibility of something like this, and the risk he ran if the King should, in his riper age, turn upon him and seek to rend him. This, however, did not deter him from pressing his democratic treatise on the attention and study of his royal pupil.