The sudden and untimely death of Dr. Wallace has left this volume incomplete, and incapable of being completed as he would have done it. Detailed facts are in part awanting, but they are awanting in every biography and autobiography, and after the oblivion of centuries has passed over them, they tend to be unintelligible and uninteresting as lying remote from everyday experience. These, however, the inquiring reader, to his reasonable satisfaction, can find elsewhere; what he will never find elsewhere are Dr. Wallace’s ultimate, deliberate, critical estimates of the life and work of Buchanan. His book, as it grew under his nimble pen, grew, probably unconsciously, to be not so much an articulation of the bare bones of fact as a narrative of the genesis, evolution, growth, and vitality of Buchanan’s ideas, more especially his ideas affecting social democratic development, and in particular his capital heresy, dangerous for himself, but vital for the race, touching the ‘rights of man.’ Few men of any country have had such versatility of talent, and have in life found tasks so varied as George Buchanan and Robert Wallace. No other Scotsman known to me, through credible report or in the flesh, has had the personal experience that would enable him so well to understand and interpret the personal experience of George Buchanan. Both were pre-eminent in the university learning of their respective eras, which had little in common except Latin; scholastic logic and metaphysic being the dominating study of Buchanan’s days, as inductive positive science is of ours. Both were wandering scholars seeking for fortune, or at least for bread; each acting as tutor, schoolmaster, university professor, man of letters, theologian, politician, and teacher of public men who were too ignorant or too neglectful of honest rational principle to be fit to rule in mercy and in justice; both were doomed by circumstances or by conscience to poverty and the discrediting influences of poverty, though fit to furnish invaluable light and guidance to their fellow-men. Methinks the pre-Reformation church was a kinder, less harsh nursing-mother to the inquiring, doubting, hesitating, satirical Protestant, than the dry-as-dust nurses of ultra-Protestantism, agnosticism, atheism, and sincere worship of nothing except Mammon’s golden calf were to the learned literary man of our day who, afflicted with distracting doubts himself, and many sorrows, could still give reasons for his faith in a supreme Creator and an administrator of the universe according to fixed law and unswerving right, and could help to lift the mind of his age out of a darkness deeper than Popery--the blackness of atheistic despair. Both knew about politics as revealed in the wrangling of churches or religious sects, and the strife of factions intriguing and fighting for power to govern or to misgovern. The politics familiar to Buchanan included the ethics that prompted and the arts that effected the