Bearing on this matter, passing allusion may be made to the Dirge or _Epicedium_, as he called it, which Buchanan wrote on the death of Calvin (1564), an event which occurred some three years, more or less, after Buchanan had publicly become a Protestant, when he was already a member of the General Assembly, sitting cheek-by-jowl with Knox, and on the Assembly’s judicial committee; the year when Mary, having been finally off with the Spanish Don Carlos marriage, was drawing towards the Catholic Darnley marriage, which Knox, correctly scenting on the way, was beginning to anathematise by anticipation, he having the year before fiercely denounced from the High Kirk pulpit the Spanish alliance as fatal to Scotland, because it was an ‘infidel’ marriage, and ‘all Papists are infidels,’ said the uncompromising one, in the true Athanasian vein, on the head of which he had quarrelled with Mary and Moray also; while all the time Buchanan was, to Knox’s knowledge, continuing to act as Mary’s Court poet, and possibly meditating on the ‘Pompa’ or masque for her wedding, and getting on so well with her that she was arranging for giving him that £500 (Scots) pension from Crossraguel Abbey, out of which it cost him such excruciating difficulty to get anything at all, at the same time that he was helping the General Assembly to revise the _Book of Discipline_, translating Spanish despatches for the Privy Council, and generally acting as ‘handy man’ on the highest planes all round. This ‘Dirge’ is too long for quotation: a curious attempt to combine the Pagan spirit and the Calvinistic theology--spiritual elevation and sarcastic wit in the best poetic form. ‘Those who believe that there are no _Manes_, _i.e._ no hereafter, or if they do, live despising Pluto and the trans-Stygian penalties, may well deplore their coming fate, while they leave sorrow to surviving friends. But we have no such grief over our lost Calvin. He has passed beyond the stars, and, filled with a draught of Deity (_Numinis_), lives in an eternal and nearer enjoyment of “God” (_Deo_). But Death has not taken all of him from us. We have monuments of his genius and his fame wherever the Reformed religion has spread. We have the terror which he struck, and which his name will continue to strike, into your Popes--your Clements and Pauls, and Juliuses and Piuses; while we know that the Pontiff tyrant of fire and sword who appropriated all the functions of the nether kingdom--becoming a Pluto in empire, a Harpy in his shameful extortions, a Fury in his martyr-making fire, a Charon in his viaticum (_Charon naulo_), and a Cerberus in his mitre (_triplici corona Cerberus_)--will have to appropriate the penalties also of the same lower world, becoming a Tantalus thirsty amidst waters, a Sisyphus rolling back the ever-recurring stone, a Prometheus with vultures ceaselessly pecking at his liver, a Danaid vainly filling her empty bucket, and an Ixion twisted into a circle on his endless wheel.’