And be it remembered that all this cultivation of a Latin style was not mere dilettante work on his part. He and one Sturm of Strasbourg, along with other Humanists, had formed the design of making Latin the vernacular of Europe, and actually believed that it would ultimately become such. Hence they had a twofold purpose in writing Latin. They desired to forward this reform of a universal language, and they wished to be intelligible to a Latin-speaking posterity. I state this on the authority of Dr. P. Hume Brown, the well-known author of _George Buchanan, Humanist and Reformer_, and I should not advise any one rashly to contradict Dr. Brown on any Buchanan matter. He seems to me to have mastered the entire subject, and to have left very little for subsequent research to do, unless some lucky ‘find’ of new sources should occur. I have been able to glean nothing from any quarter that I have not found already known to Dr. Brown, and recorded by him, unless it be some such small fact as the presence of Joseph Scaliger in Edinburgh in 1566, along with his friend Chastaigner, but not expressly to see Buchanan; and other little things of that sort. I do not pretend to contribute any fresh Buchanan materials. My object is the humble, but not, I hope, useless one of boiling down Dr. Brown and the other scientific biographers, and attempting a brief popular presentation of what Buchanan was and did. Another proof of the varied power of Buchanan is found in the storm he raised as a controversialist, in the still burning question as to the guilt or innocence of Mary Queen of Scots. In 1571, four years after the Scottish people had deposed their sovereign, Buchanan published a pamphlet, or what in these days would probably have taken the shape of a magazine article, with the title _Detectio Mariæ Reginæ_, i.e. _The Detection or Exposure of Queen Mary_, or as an editor of to-day would have been sure to head it, _The Truth about the Queen_. Buchanan’s object in this publication is to vindicate the Scottish people and their leaders before the public opinion of Europe for having, after the murder of Darnley, brought Mary’s career as sovereign to a close, as being not only a public danger, but a public scandal. That the vigour of the _brochure_ itself, backed up by Buchanan’s immense reputation, went far to make Mary an impossible factor in European politics, is beyond question. To the same extent he made himself the _bête noire_ of Mary’s friends and apologists, and very brutal and very black they certainly made him out to be. In more recent times a school of sentimental historians has arisen, who refuse to see in Mary either fault or flaw, and recognise in her a sort of spotless goddess, of irresistible charm, thrown away upon an unworthy age. Not content with pity--it would be inhuman not to feel it in any case--they show how true it is that pity is akin to love, and falling victims in some degree to the spell which ruined the unhappy and love-maddened