It is in the same spirit that he dedicates his _History_ to the King (1582, James sixteen). He knows perfectly well how his book is likely to be taken. Writing (1577) to Sir Thomas Randolph, Queen Elizabeth’s representative at the Scottish court, and Buchanan’s _quondam_ pupil at Paris, he says: ‘I am occupiit in wryting of our historie, being assurit to content few, and to displease many thairthrow.’ Among the many ‘displeased,’ he could not but foresee that possibly the young King might be found, on account of the unfavourable view which, in common with most historians, he felt himself obliged to take of the character and career of the King’s own mother, Queen Mary. He must have felt too that, unless James were all the more magnanimous, he might take deep offence--as he did, death alone saving Buchanan from criminal proceedings on account of his ‘seditious’ writings--at his now nominal preceptor’s contention that by the Constitution of Scotland the monarchy had, as an historical fact as well as by a true philosophy, been all along a derivative and limited, even very limited, one, and anything but a divinely authorised Absolutism, as maintained by courtly authorities. Buchanan, however, prefers to assume that James had enough of the king and the public man in him to sink private feeling in public duty and accept truth, however unpleasant; and accordingly he dedicates his _History_ to him, urging him to follow the example of his good predecessors and eschew that of the bad ones, and more particularly commending to his notice and imitation the career of the saintly David I., the ‘sair saunt for the crown’ of one of his successors and descendants, as a ruler who, according to his lights--some of which, however, especially those that led to his profuse and corrupting liberality to the Church, Buchanan, herein endorsing John Major, his early St. Andrews ‘regent’ in Logic, emphatically decries--devoted himself not to pleasure, or the strengthening of his prerogative, but to what seemed to him to be the true welfare of his people. In all this, some of Buchanan’s critics have thought him too stern, and that gentler methods might have won over James to better thoughts. But truth must always be stern to those who dislike or fear it. Yet those only are the real friends of these latter who give them the chance of profiting by it; and in so acting by James, come what might of himself and his personal fortunes, Buchanan will be thought by most admirers of a high _morale_ to have stamped himself as a wholly high-minded and even heroic character. CHAPTER IV FURTHER CHARACTERISTICS _A Stoic Philosopher_