Anybody with a fair understanding of Latin and a full understanding of epigram, who reads the last couplet here, will know that Scaliger was perfectly qualified to pronounce a judgment in the matter. For the benefit of the man in the street, it may be stated that what Scaliger was driving at was that Buchanan had brought poetry to a pitch of perfection beyond which it could not go; and that as Scotland had in the past been the last line of expansion for the Roman Empire, so in the future it would, in the person of Buchanan, be found to have given the highest note of Roman eloquence. Of course it may be said that this was only the customary and privileged lie of the epitaph; but that it was really Scaliger’s deliberate opinion appears from a well-known quotation from his table-talk, that ‘in Latin poetry Buchanan stands alone in Europe, and leaves everybody else behind.’ Coming to more modern times, it will probably be admitted that Wordsworth knew good poetry when he saw it, and he says of one of Buchanan’s poems--by no means his best--that it was equal in sentiment, if not in elegance, to anything in Horace. This he said before a pedantic relative pointed out a false quantity. What he would have felt had he known this before he read the poem, Schoolmaster only knows. What the latter potentate would have done we may partly surmise from what Porson actually did when some one got him to commence reading Buchanan’s poetry and he stumbled up against a false quantity, or what he regarded as such. He at once got up and pitched the volume across the room in disgust, probably with an accompaniment of expressions not loud but deep. Regarding which behaviour, two remarks seem natural. The first is that possibly Buchanan was right and Porson wrong. At Eton, as is well known, Porson was a poor quantitarian, and fell behind in consequence. He may have made up his leeway afterwards, but not likely, and certainly his line of scholarship was not in the direction of Latin Prosody.