the Tagus in a vessel that had put in there on her way to England from Crete, he landed in London, which he left for his favourite Paris. He was now for the next five years tutor to a son of Marshal Brissac, with whom he resided a good deal in Italy. He returned to Scotland about the time that Queen Mary did, in 1560; joined the party of the Regent Murray; was tutor to young James VI., and held other important appointments; and died in Edinburgh in 1582, in his seventy-seventh year. The most valuable books of Buchanan are his version of the Psalms, and his Rerum Scoticarum Historia; but his satires are very excellent, and must have helped to bring the men of the ancient system into a wholesome and desirable contempt. The Franciscanus holds the first place amongst them. It is a Juvenalian satire in sonorous hexameters of great swing and flow; for Buchanan was almost equally at home in every form of Latin composition, from the sweet ripple of elegiacs to the stormy roll of indignant heroics. He places himself in the position of one who is dissuading a friend from entering the Franciscans, and proceeds to lay bare their character and habits. They are recruited, he says, from those who have no means at home; or who have angry stepmothers, and severe fathers and masters; or who are lazy, and cold to all the attractions of the muses. The order to such is a harbour of refuge and of ignoble ease. Some look after the door, and some after the kitchen. One digs in the garden; another is employed to trick widows. The duller sort are sent to dupe the rural vulgar; to give apples to the boys, and amulets to the girls, whose heads they fill with the most superstitious fancies. The dullest blockhead assumes the appearance of wisdom when he has become one of these friars, and learns to humbug the world; and in his old age may proceed to teach the art to young beginners. He will teach him how to make a judicious use of confession, and to plunder well those whose secret thoughts and deeds have become his property; how to lure innocent virgins into sin; and how, if any one resolutely declines communication with the sect, to earwig his servants, and try to get up accusations against him,— especially if his life should prove irreproachable, the accusation of heresy. A great deal more advice of the kind is given, and a story told of an adventure which had evidently befallen Buchanan himself on the Garonne. One of the brothers was travelling in company with a woman who fell into labour in the vessel; and he abandoned her to her fate, running away amidst the confusion caused by the event at the landing-place. Buchanan tells the story in the person of an old Franciscan; and, with admirable irony, makes him conclude by saying:-"Young and strong as I then was, I could hardly silence the murmurs of the people, often though I execrated the deed, and swore that the offender was some Lutheran lying hidden under the name of our holy sect!" We do not find in the satirical portions of Buchanan's writings the Erasmian vein of Sir David Lindsay, or the rollicking humour of Rabelais, nor even the intermediate kind of pleasantry, smacking of both, of the Epistola Obscurorum Virorum. His fun is grim; and his abuse hearty. He is of the Juvenalian and Swiftian school of satire; a good hard proud Scots gentleman, whose keen feeling for classical beauty has given him elegance but not gentleness. There was nothing of what is now called "gushing" about George, any more than about those similar types of Scot, Smollett and Lockhart. He had much love for his own friends; much humour and feeling at bottom; but very little compassion for fools, rascals, or personal enemies. Many of his epigrams are bitter enough; and we shall transcribe a couple of them from a recent translation :— ON THE MONKS OF ST. ANTONY. When living, thou, St. Antony, As swine-herd kept thy swine; The monks as stupid are as they, So much agrees 'tween herd and herd, If but thy monks, St. Antony, Had acorns for their food! ON PONTIFF PIUS. Heaven he had sold for money; earth he left in death as well; Buchanan the latest, is also the last of the satirists on whom we have undertaken to offer some criticisms in this paper. It has been seen that the Low Countries, Germany, France, and Scotland, each produced within the compass of about a century satirists whose names have become classical, and whose powers were exerted in the same direction. The exact value of their services to the cause of divine truth and human enlightenment cannot be estimated; but it was undoubtedly great. The friends of the cause valued them; its foes feared them. They were nearly all persecuted; they were all, without exception, we think, libelled. Two of them were, in ignorance however, grossly misrepresented by succeeding generations of their own friends and countrymen. Francis Rabelais was made the traditional hero of a score of foolish anecdotes, apocryphal, obscene, and profane. George Buchanan became, in the eyes of the Scottish peasantry, the king's fool of a past age; and chap-books, filled with the dirtiest stories about him, circulated by thousands among the cottages of his native land. The last historical fact is only amusing. But there were other conditions common to these men of great importance, which may be well commended to the attention of those who are inclined to underrate satirists generally, and to that of the ordinary comic writers of our own time. These satirists of the Reformation were all scholars and thinkers to a man not wits only, still less buffoons, but invariably among the bestread men, and the most vigorous manly intellects of their generation. Erasmus towered over the whole century; and by universal admission, Buchanan did more skilfully than any writer what every writer of the period was trying to do; while Hutten was recognized along the whole length of the Rhine as one of the most accomplished men in Germany; and Rabelais ranked from the first among the most learned men in France. What is equally worthy of notice, no solid charge has ever been proved against the characters of any of the satirists of the Reformation. Hutten was probably not the soberest man in Europe, but he was generous, and faithful, and brave, and true. Erasmus was loved by the best men then living; and Rabelais and Lindsay trusted by the chief personages of their respective kingdoms. As for the silly lies which were once disseminated against Buchanan by such writers as Father Garasse, they are no longer repeated even by Popish malignity. The lies and the liars have passed into a common obscurity. The study of such writers would seem, we may say in conclusion, to have a practical value, as well as a merely antiquarian interest. The last man who did any political work of European importance by the use of satire-Béranger-felt strongly on this subject. He had been often urged to come forward for the Academy, but always persistently declined; and he gave a remarkable explanation of his reasons for this decision. The chanson, he said, may be again needed as a political instrument; and I could not, as a chansonnier, set an example which might lead to its being prostituted by ambitious men to the service of power. The sentiment is noble; and it is instructive. Satire may again be necessary in politics and other fields; and if the reaction against modern knowledge and thought, which seems to be gaining ground in some quarters, should become really formidable to intellectual freedom, we may some of us be none the less useful for having studied the satirical masters of the great sixteenth century. 629 By the Sea-Side in South-East Africa. ALONG the whole Natal coast-line there is, so far as I know, but one spot which can fairly be called a watering-place. To that length of southeast African shore might also be added two hundred miles to the south, and two hundred miles to the north of our colonial frontiers, and then we shall have nearly six hundred miles of glorious sea-frontage utterly unused for purposes of enjoyment by man. The sole rival of Brighton or Biarritz in this part of the world is the place I refer to. A smaller can hardly exist, for it contains only one house. And even that house would, in the eyes of all my English readers, be deemed little better than a hovel. Such as it is, I am its tenant for the time being, and a vast fund of true and healthful enjoyment does the tenancy of my hovel confer upon me. Few shores can present less variety of outline than that of South-East Africa. No navigable rivers empty themselves into the sea; thus there are no estuaries. Scores of narrow, rocky, shallow streams do fall into the ocean, after devious courses from the ever-visible uplands, but all of them have sand-bars across their mouths, and during the dry mid-year months of winter these bars can often be traversed dryshod. Nor are there any creeks, harbours, or indentations of any kind, except where, here and there, some river-guarding bluff advances a little further than usual into the sea, and thus affords, on one side at least, a small measure of shelter. Between Delagoa Bay on the north, and Algoa Bay on the south-and there are, say, seven hundred miles between them-only one port worth the name is found, and that is Durban, the leading commercial centre of Natal. There an all but landlocked basin, about five miles long, affords a safe haven for vessels of moderate tonnage. My watering-place, which is what I have to do with now, is about fifteen miles south of Durban. Africa is but a beginner in civilization as yet; and although six miles of railway are in operation near the town, they do not come in this direction. Nor, indeed, do public vehicles of any kind offer facilities for travel. In Natal, when we want to go about, but one way is possible to those who are burdened with baggage or other impedimenta. We have to post to our watering-place. But our chariot is a clumsy, big, and springless waggon, and our team consists of fourteen gigantic oxen, whose vast-spreading horns never fail to strike the stranger with surprise. This cumbrous vehicle is as slow as it is uncomfortable. Moving at the rate of about two miles an hour, we hope to reach our destination ere dusk. The road, though flat, is sandy. Long hills, shaggy with tropical bush-growth, and enlivened by the gardens and On the other side the cottages of suburban residents, skirt our way. mangrove swamp, which lines the bay, hems us in. coolies, laden with fruit and vegetables for sale in town, pass us. Solitary horsemen, devoid of knightly trappings, are seen ambling along such sylvan and shady by-paths as Mr. G. P. R. James would have delighted in. Here we plunge through a narrow, bridgeless stream, where, at high tide, the oxen might have to swim. Here we come to a tree of untold antiquity, under whose spreading branches many a picnic party has disported, and many a belated traveller encamped for the night. After three hours' "trekking," or crawling, the panting oxen are set free, to depasture themselves for an hour or two. No inn is near; but waggon travellers csorn hotel accommodation, being, of all classes of wayfarers, the most selfreliant. Brushwood is gathered in the neighbouring bush by our attendant Kaffirs, a fire is lit, the kettle is boiled, and, seated on the ground, our party take their midday meal. A few words about that party may not be out of place. I am the only man amongst them a fact portending serious responsibilities. The costume of my fair fellow-travellers would give a serious shock to the proprieties of Scarborough or Deauville. Hats that are nearly two feet in diameter shield the feminine visages from the scorching sun, Crinoline was never in less demand. At my watering-place the utility of apparel is estimated according to its age and strength. The total absence of all curious eyes enables the laws of Nature and the dictates of comfort to be consistently followed. In the month of May with us the shadows begin to lengthen early, and our journey's end draws near. After crossing the Umlazi by a wooden bridge, we pass sugar-mills in quick succession. For this long, narrow plain, stretching out from the head of the bay, is almost covered with plantations, whose thick, ribbon-like leaves make a cheery rustle as we pass them. The chessboard-like divisions of coffee-estates may also be seen on the wooded hillsides. A little further and we cross a wide, shallow stream, in the quicksands of whose bottom waggons often stick for hours, and which is sometimes so flooded in the summer as to be impassable by horsemen. Now we leave all traces of a road behind us, and follow the bed of the river for half a mile or more, until a narrow path, cut out of the side of a steep hill, shows us that our seaside retreat has at last been reached. I have ridden on ahead, meanwhile, to "prospect" the place, and see how we could get into the house; for when too late to return to Durban it is discovered that the one key which serves for all the doors has been left behind. A narrow path cut out of the side of a steep hill, rising at an angle of about forty-five degrees, brings me to an opening of the bush on the top of a shoulder of the hill, about a hundred feet above the plain. Just through this, in a small shelf-like nook, surrounded on three sides by bush, stands our home for the ensuing month. My enthusiasm about the attractions of the spot somewhat abated when I saw our residence. It |