murders of Cardinal Beaton, Rizzio, Darnley, Regent Moray, and Queen Mary, and that often imperilled his own life. Nevertheless, worn out by his years and assiduous labours, he died in his bed when his work was done, a fortnight after his _History_ of his country was published, and before his old pupil the Scottish Solomon had time to discover all the treason it contained; ordered his servant to give his few last coins to a beggar, and left the care of his funeral to all whom it might concern on Christian, natural, civic, and sanitary grounds, ending his long, busy, chequered tenure of time with that courage and hope which gilds the last sunset of those who have striven to do right and never doubted that God is just. There was no man in Scotland or in Europe that could have been of so much service to Scotland in guiding it through the troubles and storms, political, moral, and religious, of the Reformation as Buchanan, if the people of Scotland, more especially the feudal lords of Scotland, had been fit to follow the dictates of the broadest, most complete worldly wisdom, and of the clear conscience of one who had spent his years in study and in poverty, who had lived the life of a stranger to the entanglements of foolish pleasure and the illusions of earthly hope, who had the most of his possible life behind him and eternity in no distant prospect, and who had no conceivable motive to applaud murder or to tell lies. Sceptical by innate constitution, and educated to doubt in the schools of adversity and experience, personal and historical, he was not the man to commit himself hastily to faith in dark dogmas and half-explored truths; he was the man to be a cautious, judicious reformer, not the man to be an impetuous, frantic destroyer, too rash and unrestrained to discriminate between the entirely and partially unsound, too just to plunder churchmen, some of them profligate, in order to enrich feudal lords skilled in few arts except the arts of war and theft. Like Erasmus and Beza, he saw that the old order of society was dissolving; but, like all wise men, he preferred slow and gradual to revolutionary change.