However, the Royal party came specially from Dalkeith on a subsequent day, and received the keys at the Cross, and nobody even whispered “Anticlimax!”
CHAPTER SIX
MEN OF LETTERS. PART I.
George Buchanan is the first in time as he is one of the first in eminence of Scots men of letters. Many wrote before him; among the kings, James I. certainly, James V. possibly, and even yet they are worth reading by others than students. There is Gawin Douglas, the Bishop, there is Buchanan’s contemporary, Knox, the Reformer, whose work is classic, but they are not men of letters in the modern sense of the term. Buchanan is. Literature was his aim in life, and he lived by it indirectly if not directly. He is always to me a perplexing figure. How deep was his reforming zeal, how deep his beliefs, I cannot tell. I have read, I trust not without profit, Mr. Hume Brown’s two careful volumes upon this great Scot, but he has not solved my doubts. The old scholar was too learned, too travelled, too cultured to be in harmony with the Scotland of his day; a certain aloofness marks him, a stern and heroic rather than a human and sympathetic figure. You remember how consistently the British Solomon hated his sometime schoolmaster. Certain quaint anecdotes remain of their relations, but they have not to do with Edinburgh; yet he died in the capital, and in one or two memories that linger round those last hours you seem just at the end to get in real touch with the man, with the human figure under the cloak. In 1581 James Melville, the diarist, with certain friends, visited him in Edinburgh. They found him teaching the young man that served him: A, b, ab, and so forth. “I see you are not idle,” said one of the visitors in ironical astonishment, but he said it was better than idleness. They mentioned his magnum opus, his History of Scotland, the literary sensation of the day, if that day had literary sensations. He stopped them. “I may da nae mair for thinking on another matter.” “What is that?” says Mr. Andro. “To die,” quoth he.
They went to the printer’s to have a peep at the last sheets, just passing through the press, where they presently spied some plain-spoken words like to be highly unpalatable at Court. Again they sought the old scholar and spoke to him about them. “Tell me, man,” says he, “giff I have tould the truth.” His visitors were of the same views as himself, and they could not shirk so plain an issue. “Yes, sir,” says one of them, “I think sae.” Then says the old man sternly: “Let it remain, I will byde it, whatever happen. Pray, pray to God for me and let Him direct all.” A “Stoick” philosopher, says Melville, and so he proved to the end, which came on the 28th of September 1582, in Kennedy’s Close, the second close to the west of the Tron Kirk, and long since vanished. The day before he died he found that he had not enough money to pay for his funeral, but even this, he said, must be given to the poor, his body could fare for itself. Wisely provident for its own renown Edinburgh gave him a public funeral in the Greyfriars Churchyard. Tradition marked the spot for some time, and then a blacksmith put up a tablet at his own cost, but that too vanished, and one is not certain that the learned Dr. David Laing succeeded in fixing the true place. As we have seen, the University of Edinburgh possesses what is believed to be his skull. When Deacon Brodie stole the mace, this trophy did not come under his hand, or it had surely gone too.
WILLIAM DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN
From the Painting by Cornelius Janson van Ceulen
No one could be less like George Buchanan than William Drummond of Hawthornden, born three years after the death of the other, save that he also was a man of letters, and that he also had intimate connection with Edinburgh. Hawthornden is one of the beauty spots near the capital. Here Ben Jonson paid him, in 1618-19, one of the most famous visits in all the history of letters. The story is that Drummond was seated under a huge sycamore tree when Jonson’s huge form hove in sight. The meeting of two poets needs must call forth a spark of poetry.
“Welcome! Welcome! royal Ben!
Thank ye kindly, Hawthornden!”
A little suspicious, you may think! Where did Ben Jonson learn to address a Scots laird in this peculiarly Scots fashion? After all, Ben’s forbears came from Annandale, and who that has seen Hawthornden will doubt here was the ideal spot for such an encounter? Drummond was a devoted cavalier; his death was caused or hastened by that of Charles I. He was buried by his favourite river in the neighbouring churchyard of Lasswade. He has written his own epitaph: