Buchanan’s truthfulness and resolute desire to be impartial can be best inferred in our time from his _History of Scotland_, at which he had written for years, and for which he had collected materials from his boyhood. The style of it appears to be an eclectic adaptation of available and appropriate elements from the styles of Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus. It wants the special charm of ‘Livy’s pictured page,’ for Scottish places, deeds, heroes, and tastes did not for Buchanan’s earnest, realistic, dialectical, judicial mind present inducements to poetic word-painting--indeed, it was after his day, before the fascinations of the picturesque dawned upon the mind of Scotland, unless it may have been to some semi-mythical, mist-inspired member of the tribe of Ossian. The speeches of his _History_ are the most tersely expressed, forcibly reasoned specimens of ancient Scottish oratory, assuming, of course, that they ought to have been delivered, but that they never were. They want the terse, pregnant suggestiveness of the orations of Tacitus; but they may probably appear to be not less skilfully adapted for the dramatic surroundings in which they are supposed to have been delivered. Young students of Latin, especially in the Aberdeen region, have found it to be for their interest to read and re-read Buchanan’s _History_, and it is in the original that the literary art and linguistic skill of its author can be best seen. But it is still worth reading, and is often read in Dr. Watkins’ translation, which as a translation reflects a good deal more credit upon its author than his old-womanly, newspapery but not dishonest attempt at original historical composition shown in his bringing down of Buchanan’s masterly story to the culmination or extinction of Scottish history in the visit of George IV. to Edinburgh. The babes and sucklings of the school of Dry-as-dust assert that Buchanan is superseded as an historian; but a man of Buchanan’s powers and opportunities can never be superseded as a narrator of the history of his own time. Buchanan died on the 28th September 1582, a few days or weeks after his _History_ had been published. He had striven, in spite of old age, ill-health, and poverty, to accomplish this long-meditated patriotic task; and when he had corrected the proofs and given it to the world, he felt that his last slender tie to life was broken, and his long, chequered, poorly-paid day’s work was done. His death took place in Kennedy’s Close, the second close off the High Street of Edinburgh above the Tron Church, as recorded by ‘George Paton, Antiquary,’ upon the rather reliable authority of an ancient Lord Advocate, Sir James Stewart of Goodtrees.