George Buchanan, an eloquent critic of corruption…

George Buchanan, an eloquent critic of corruption and inefficiency in church and state, is also known throughout Europe as a scholar and a Latin poet.

After attending the University of Paris and the University of St. Andrews, Buchanan had become a teacher in the Collège de Sainte-Barbe in Paris, where he taught Latin according to the new method of Thomas Linacre, whose book in English on Latin grammar he translated into Latin in 1533.

Because of Buchanan's two bitter attacks on the Franciscans—Somnium (1535) and Franciscanus et fratres (1527)—he had been jailed as a heretic.

He escaped and accepted a position as teacher at the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux, where Montaigne had been one of his pupils.

Buchanan found diversion in translating Euripides' Medea and Alcestis into Latin and in writing original dramas—e.g., Baptistes (1534) and Jepthes (1578)—attacking tyranny.

He was teaching in 1547 in a Portuguese experimental school.

Accused of heresy, he had been immured in a monastery for instruction but in 1552 had been released and allowed to leave Portugal.

In captivity he had composed a paraphrase of the Psalms that will long be used to instruct Scottish youth in Latin.

After serving as a tutor in France, during which time he had written De sphaera (1555), a Latin poem in five books, and Epithalamium (1558), a poem on the marriage of Mary, Queen of Scots, to the French dauphin, he returned to Scotland in 1561.

At first a supporter of Mary, he has become her bitter enemy after the murder in 1567 of her second husband, Lord Darnley.

He had helped to prepare the case against Mary that was presented to Elizabeth I and that will result eventually in Mary's execution.

Under the several succeeding regents, he has been tutor to the young king James VI and held other offices.

De jure regni apud Scotos (1579), the most important of his political writings, is a resolute assertion of limited monarchy in dialogue form; Rerum Scoticarum historia (1582), which he is completing at the time of his death, traces the history of Scotland from the mythical Fergus.