Regia, finitimis invidiosa locis. Sicine divinos Babylon irrideat hymnos, Audiat et sanctos terra profana modos?

O Solymae, O adyta, et sacri penetralia templi,

Ullane vos animo deleat hora meo? Conprecor, ante meae capiant me oblivia dextrae,

Nec memor argutae sit mea dextra lyrae.

For five verses of the English, we have ten couplets in Latin. The expansion is free. Observe, for instance, how "Sing us one of the songs of Sion "is handled. Yet we gain in smoothness and in perfect ease of transition. The result is really felt to be an original Latin poem.

Or again, take Psalm 150. The Prayer Book version isO praise God in his holiness: praise

him in the firmament of his power. Praise him in his noble acts: praise him according to his excellent greatness. Praise him in the sound of the trumpet: praise him upon the lute and harp. Praise him in the cymbals and dances: praise him upon the strings and pipe. Praise him upon the well-tuned cymbals : praise him upon the loud cymbals. Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord.

Buchanan has

1. Laudate Dominum lucidum Templum colentem siderum Qui vi suae potentiae Firmarit orbis cardines.

Those verses I thus translate in blank verse

It is the quivered Scot's peculiar pride To hem the quarry in the woods, to swim

The flood, and fear not hunger, heat, nor cold.

Not with high walls nor fosses deep he guards

His land, but in embattled ranks of war,

Reckless of life, so he keep honour safe.

His promise is his bond; he venerates The title "friend" as earth's most sacred tie,

And loves his comrade's virtues, not his gold.

Thus, when war ranged through all the bounds of earth,

When every land lost its ancestral laws And was made subject to a foreign yoke,

One nation only, in its ancient home, Held fast the freedom of the days of old.

The fiery Goth paused here, the onslaught fierce

Of Saxon, and the Saxon's conqueror. And when the Norman overthrew the Dane,

Norman met here his match. And if we deem

That olden story still is worth the search,

E'en Rome, who conquered all the world beside,

On Scotia's borders checked her swift

career.

From the large number of shorter poems, which range from gaiety to savagery, and are not free from coarseness, but are always exquisite in their Latinity, we are tempted to quote. But we must content ourselves with a reference to the verses prefixed to the Paraphrase of the Psalms, in which he dedicates that work to Queen Mary: I mean the verses which begin—

Nympha, Caledoniae quae nunc feliciter

orae

Missa per innumeros sceptra tueris

avos,

and end with the sentiment that his verses had borrowed from the Queen graces which they did not possess in themselves

Nam quod ab ingenio domini sperare nequibant,

Debebunt genio forsitan illa tuo.

Here we have Buchanan at his best the playfulness of the friend tempering the dignity of the scholar and the courtier.!

The chief prose writings of Buchanan have been already mentioned. From the History (Rerum Scoticarum Historia,' Bk. XVII. ch. 61) I select a passage describing the murder of David Rizzio.

(The conspirators made a solemn compact to destroy Rizzio.)

His omnium chirographo confirmatis, regeque caedis auctorem se profitente, tum ut condemnationem procerum absentium praevenirent, tum ne mora consilium palam fieret, statim facinus aggredi visum est. Igitur cum regina in cellula augusta cenaret, adhibitis de

the death of one, and that a villain, that. was resolved on. While this passed, Rizzio was dragged out into out into the next chamber, then into the outer chamber, where those who were waiting with Douglas despatched him at last, after giving him many wounds. This was contrary to the intentions of all who had conspired to put him to death; for they had resolved to hang him publicly, knowing that such a sight would be an agreeable spectacle to the people."

Buchanan (as Dr Hume Brown has pointed out) spent his life in communicating three leading ideas. In the first place, he implanted in his pupils the desire for correct expression, for purity of speech. The Latin language before his time had been debased into a barbarous dialect, destitute of accuracy or taste. He culti vated purity of language as an instrument of moral and intellectual culture.

In the second place, he advocated a form of government (whether a republic or a monarchy) in which the ruler receives his authority from the law.

In the third place, he strove to renew the national religion, making of it a pietas litterata, or piety tempered by all that culture and learning can convey. And all these lessons were driven home by a powerful personality, in which intellect was balanced by will. "The greatest man of his age," so Salmasius called him. He was great not only in his writings, but in the living work of an educator, in which he spent many of the happiest hours of his long and honourable career. For his services to learning and to education, in Scotland and elsewhere, he deserves to be remembered. And it may be recalled that the portrait on the cover of the magazine in which this article appears is the portrait of George Buchanan.

"WHO'S for the shore ? shouted the captain's clerk, when luncheon was well under way in the gun-room of the Cassiopeia one sizzling hot day in the year 1884, waving over his head as he spoke the midshipmen's leave book.

"Shove my name down, and Fordham's too," replied Sartoris, the senior midshipman, in equally stentorian tones. "I haven't had a look at the beach for I don't know when. Number One's got such a down on me that he keeps jamming my leave out of sheer cussedness. He's hard up for excuses now, though, and I don't think he'll have invented a new one since yesterday, when he said he couldn't spare me from my duties as mate of the upper deck. It's make and mend' to-day, so he can't use that again."

،

"He's in rather good form to-day," remarked the captain's clerk, who had been told off by Sartoris to take charge of the leave book because he was "supposed to be able to write, and Number One always says he can't read my writing."

Directly after lunch Sartoris, whose duty it was, took the leave book to the first lieutenant for signature. That officer, who was enjoying his pipe in the ward-room smoking circle under the poop, and

looking very much pleased with life, contented himself with a cursory glance at the names therein and a whimsical look at the boy, and signed without a word. But as the latter crossed the deck to the gunroom smoking place, he heard the first lieutenant remark to the navigator, "It's no use stopping that fellow's leave; he puts his name in the book every day."

Sartoris grinned.

The Cassiopeia was lying off Port of Spain, in the island of Trinidad, where the water is so shallow that even that little ship, which drew but 17 feet of water, had to lie quite two miles and a half from the shore, and as there was no wind that afternoon, the cutter's crew had to pull the heavy officer's boat all the way in to the landing-place-and off again.

On the way ashore, our two friends, who had stowed themselves away in the bows of the boat, as the stern sheets were full of ward-room officersincluding the first lieutenant,discussed what they should do when they got ashore. They had both thoroughly explored the town on the occasions of previous visits to the island, and had found nothing very exciting, the "attractions" consisting mainly of heat, rum,