Early Blackwood's and Scottish Identities (William Blackwood) (Critical Essay‪)‬

"I MUST CONGRATULATE YOU ON THE ENGRAVING OF BUCHANNAN," JOHN Murray wrote to William Blackwood, after seeing the title-page of Blackwood's new monthly magazine. (1) The name that Murray misspelled was George Buchanan's, whose bearded visage would stare from the title-page of Blackwood's and still stares from his mortuary stele in Greyfriars Kirkyard, Edinburgh. Buchanan was a leading sixteenth-century Scots Humanist and Protestant reformer: a Latin scholar of continental reputation whose students included Montaigne, Queen Mary and King James VI of Scotland; a Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and Keeper of Scotland's Privy Seal; a Latin polemicist, historian and poet. George Buchanan would be Blackwood's face in more than one sense. The cultural values and activities that he represented--his Scottish patriotism, his Protestant Christian classicism, his polemics against a dominant ideology--would be basic to early Blackwood's search for Scottish roots and Scottish identities. (2) In "Observations on the Writings of George Buchanan," the lead-article of Blackwood's June 1818 number, the anonymous observer lamented "the decay of classical learning in Scotland" and Scottish ignorance of "those authors whose works, in every other part of civilized Europe, are venerated and studied as the best fountains of philosophy, and the only perfect models of taste." (3) It was not always so. In the 16th century Buchanan, John Leslie, Thomas Craig of Riccarton and other Scots Humanists had cultivated classical literature, established intellectual contact and exchange with European centers of learning, and encouraged new learned institutions in their native country. "Under the patronage of the royal race of Stuart," wrote Patrick Fraser Tytler, Blackwood's antiquarian-in-waiting, "the cultivation of letters had been encouraged by the example, and rewarded by the munificence, of a line of Kings." (4) Although Scotland then lost direct royal patronage of its courtly poetry and music when James VI of Scotland traveled south with his Court to become James I of England and Scotland, Scotland's Calvinist concern with education and the country's learned professions yet were able to produce individual men of classical learning and broad intellectual interests, whose accomplishments--theological, legal, mathematical--became apparent when the Restoration of 1660 brought a temporary easing of political tension. (5)