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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: wise and gentle verdict on the whole. "Buchanan," he says, "though
a zealous Protestant, had a good deal of the Catholic and sceptical
spirit of Erasmus, and an admiring eye for everything that was great
and beautiful. Like the rest of his countrymen, he bowed himself in
presence of the lustre that surrounded the early career of his
mistress. More than once he expressed his pride and reverence in
the inspiration of a genius deemed by his contemporaries to be
worthy of the theme. There is not, perhaps, to be found elsewhere
in literature so solemn a memorial of shipwrecked hopes, of a sunny
opening and a stormy end, as one finds in turning the leaves of the
volume which contains the beautiful epigram "Nympha Caledoniae" in
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