In a totally different walk of life he achieved almost equal distinction. He was a great scholar-poet and general writer; and when, in this connection, I use the words ‘almost equal,’ I am thinking of the question whether the director of human affairs or the artist in words and ideas of beauty or human interest is the greater. Of course, comparison of things or people generically distinct is scarcely possible. You can hardly compare a snuff-box and a policeman. But it seems less difficult to ask whether Cæsar or Shakespeare, Alfred the Great or Alfred Tennyson, was the greater man. However that may be, there can be no doubt that Buchanan rose to very great eminence as an intellectual artist, both in prose and verse. He enjoyed an unsurpassed European reputation among the Renaissance magnates of his day. Henri Estienne, for instance,--Buchanan’s Stephanus, our Stephens--said that he was _poetarum nostri sæculi facile princeps_, meaning thereby ‘easily the first poet of our time,’ which is sufficiently strong. Of course it may be said that Estienne or Stephens was only a printer. But there are printers _and_ printers, and Stephanus belonged to the second class. Anybody who knows anything about the literary history of the time will understand that such praise from Estienne implied a very great deal. Then there were the Scaligers, Julius Cæsar _père_, and Joseph _fils_, a greater man than his father, in the opinion of the best judges--himself included, probably. They were not men easy to please, the Scaligers. Even Erasmus was not good enough for Julius Cæsar, who used language truly awful about the glory of the priesthood and the shame. As for Joseph, there was but one man alive in his own line for whom he had a vestige of respect, and that was Casaubon; and he told him so, intimating that he might think a good deal of the compliment, as he, Joseph, was the only man in Europe who was capable of forming an opinion about him--a perfectly true if not absolutely humble observation. But however difficult to please in most cases, the Scaligers had a sincere and unbounded admiration of Buchanan--an admiration abundantly shown while he lived, and when he was gone, expressed, especially by the younger Scaliger, with a tenderness and beauty which stamp the tribute with authority and value. His epitaphium on Buchanan concluded thus:-- ‘Namque ad supremum perducta Poetica culmen In te stat, nec quo progrediatur habet. Imperii fuerat Romani Scotia limes; Romani eloquii Scotia finis erit.’