In the College of Guyenne he had Gouvéa as a principal, and as a pupil Montaigne, the celebrated sceptic, who is dogmatic enough to state in one of his essays that Gouvéa was ‘without comparison the chiefest rector in France,’ and that he himself had, as a principal actor, ‘undergone and represented the chiefest parts in the Latin Tragedies of Buchanan.’ When here, Beaton and the Franciscans harassed him until that fear was dispelled by the plague raging over Aquitaine and the death of his fickle patron, the King of Scots. Next, about 1547, in the wake or under the convoy of Gouvéa, he migrated to Portugal in response to the invitation of the King to teach in a resuscitation of the University of Coimbra that was being then worked out at great expense for education in the liberal arts and the philosophy of Aristotle. Many of his friends, eminent for learning, were there before him, and he expected to find peace in that out of the way corner of the world. But Gouvéa died suddenly, and then all his enemies ran at him with open mouth. He was thrown into prison, charged with writing against the Franciscans and eating flesh in Lent. The Inquisitors tormented themselves and him for six months without stateable result; and then, thinking it prudent, and perhaps honest, to conceal that their toil had been in vain, they shut him up in a monastery to be converted to the true faith or to be prepared for the fagots. To the great scholar, however, the monks, though ignorant, behaved not unkindly. They allowed him the truest literary leisure and quiet he ever had except perhaps in St. Andrews; and he devoted it to the so-called translation of David’s Psalms into Latin verse, which are in truth artistic evolutionary expositions from Hebrew hints, or splendid blossoms of sacred poetry grown from the seed given by the poet-king of Israel to the winds of heaven, in the moments of inspiration occurring in a life of suffering, of passion, and of hope. Never elsewhere did the iron fetters of Buchanan’s own environment permit him to soar so close to the firmament. When set at liberty, though the King of Portugal offered him the means of subsistence, he returned to England. But as affairs were then in disorder under a young king, he in a short time returned to France and celebrated the siege of Metz in a Latin poem, not without the approbation which rewarded all his efforts in that line of composition. Thereafter the Marshal de Brissac called him to Italy, and he lived with him and his son in Italy and France for four years till 1560, spending much time in writing his poem _De Sphæra_, and in study of the religious controversies then seething through civilised Europe, and carrying it into a scientific region that rendered a poetic exposition of the Ptolemaic system a work of futility and utterly misspent power.