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Proceedings of the Royal Society 
reputation and influence, and their authors were men of considerable 
mark ; still, forgotten as they are, it is important to remember 
that they were once famous, and though it may sound like a 
paradox, the fact of their being forgotten may in some sense he 
attributed to their power. The ruins of great controversies are 
almost always worth exploring, although the fabric itself may have 
perished. These works made their mark, and whether they failed 
or took effect, they are alike forgotten, — if in failure, because they 
failed ; if in success, because posterity has built on their foundations. 
These things do more than point the moral of the fleeting nature of 
popularity. Contemporaneous fame means contemporaneous impres- 
sion, and if that impression has been deep enough to mould and in- 
fluence the opinions or the policy of a generation, the next no doubt 
may wonder at all the trouble bestowed on what seems to them so 
slight an affair. Grandiaque effossis mirabitur arma sepulchris. 
More important, however, to the main object of my theme to-night, 
is the light which such inquiries afford to the student of history. 
Words which have arrested and absorbed the attention of the 
public at any given period, are not necessarily possessed of interest 
at any other. But their celebrity goes far to indicate of what topics 
people thought, and spoke, and wrote intensely, while that reputa- 
tion, although ephemeral, lasted. Opinion, social, moral, and 
political, may be very surely ascertained and tested by the 
applause accorded to works of contemporaneous controversy. In 
the present instance the dissertations I have chosen as my theme 
were the progeny of mighty and convulsing political and social 
events in both ends of the island. They are strokes of the hammer 
wielded by vigorous and powerful arms, in times which called for 
vigour and strength, — times in which the labyrinth of politics could 
only be safely threaded by the courageous and the wary. Whether 
my authors found the safest track, or missed their way in devious 
mazes lost, I shall not try to determine ; I only take their words as 
an index to the times. 
The author of the first of these treatises, to which most if not 
all of my attention to-night must be directed, George Buchanan, 
was one of the most remarkable men any country in Europe 
ever produced, and his life was as remarkable as his abilities. 
Sprung of a humble stock, the son of a farmer in the Lennox, 
