The Scotsman George Buchanan was acknowledged the foremost Latin poet of his age. He also became well known as an educator, historian, and political propagandist. Although a satirist of Roman Catholic orders, a victim of the Inquisition, and eventually a convert to the Protestant side, Buchanan was not, like his contemporary John Knox, an impassioned reformer of church customs and doctrines. Rather, he was "of gud religion, for a poet," according to Sir James Melville of Hallhill, and his own fortuitous career came to represent a pattern for the literary entrepreneur, necessarily engaged in the theological and political conflicts of his day, but following the path of neither priest nor lawyer. Ornamental and instrumental in court for his linguistic knowledge and art, the poet was also a vates who revealed hidden truths to the secular world. Sir Philip Sidney numbered Buchanan among the "piercing wits" and praised his...