But suppose Buchanan were wrong, what then? Is Shakespeare to be flung into the corner because many of his lines will not scan? An indignant critic of the _Agamemnon_ has discovered, what I believe is the fact, that in that play Æschylus has violated Dawes’s canon. Yet everybody that can reads the _Agamemnon_. Dr. Johnson points out that Milton uses the hideous solecism _vapulandum_. Only think of it! And yet we read _Paradise Lost_. Perhaps Porson did too, knowing nothing of _vapulandum_! Johnson was no such stickler, for he read and enjoyed Milton, _vapulandum_ notwithstanding. He had also the highest opinion of Buchanan, both as a Latinist and as ‘a great poetical genius,’ and his authority on such matters, being both poet and critic himself, is much greater than Porson’s, great though the latter was in his own department of research. Hallam is inclined to qualify the almost universal admiration of Buchanan’s poetry, but one begins to doubt Hallam’s judgment in this matter when he finds him preferring Buchanan’s _De Sphæra_ to the rest of his poetry. The _Sphere_ may contain exquisite isolated passages ‘equal to Virgil,’ as the enthusiastic Guy Patin maintained, but it is not properly a poem at all. It is really a versified and very lame defence of the exploded Ptolemaic Astronomy, totally destitute of the human interest which inspires so much else that Buchanan wrote. On his own field of history Hallam is more of an authority, and here his admiration of Buchanan is unstinted and unequivocal. He extols the ‘perspicuity and power’ of the _History of Scottish Affairs_, recognises the ‘purity’ of its diction, and affirms that few writings of the Latinists are ‘more redolent of the antique air,’ and is almost as emphatic in his eulogy as Dryden, when the latter says of Buchanan, ‘our isle may justly boast in him a writer comparable to any of the moderns, and excelled by few of the ancients.’ Froude might be cited to the same effect, but enough has been said to establish Buchanan’s fame and power in the world of letters. Of course, care must be taken to distinguish the precise character of Buchanan’s scholarship. He was not a scholar in the sense that Casaubon, or Porson, or Liddell and Scott were scholars. That is to say, he was not a classical antiquarian, or philologist, or grammarian, although he knew antiquities and such philology as was going, and had refurbished or even made a grammar or two as he went along. But he used these simply as instruments to his main aim as a scholar, which was to write as good Latin as Virgil, or Livy, or Horace, or Tacitus. There is nothing absurd or impossible in such an aim. I have heard ardent Aberdonians maintain that the late Dr. Melvin of their city wrote better Latin than Cicero, and, apart from the matter, I am quite ready to believe it. That Buchanan as good as accomplished his purpose we have already seen.