ed so little: not that she sinned so much. One
may feel, in a word, that there is every excuse for those who have
asserted Mary's innocence, because their own high-mindedness shrank from
believing her guilty: but yet Buchanan, in his own place and time, may
have felt as deeply that he could do no otherwise than he did.

The charges against him, as all readers of Scotch literature know well,
may be reduced to two heads. 1st. The letters and sonnets were
forgeries. Maitland of Lethington may have forged the letters; Buchanan,
according to some, the sonnets. Whoever forged them, Buchanan made use
of them in his Detection, knowing them to be forged. 2nd. Whether Mary
was innocent or not, Buchanan acted a base and ungrateful part in putting
himself in the forefront amongst her accusers. He had been her tutor,
her pensioner. She had heaped him with favours; and, after all, she was
his queen, and a defenceless woman: and yet he returned her kindness, in
the hour of her fall, by invectives fit only for a rancorous and reckless
advocate, determined to force a verdict by the basest arts of oratory.

Now as to the "casket" letters. I should have thought they bore in
themselves the best evidence of being genuine. I can add nothing to the
arguments of Mr. Froude and Mr. Burton, save this: that no one clever
enough to be a forger, would have put together documents so incoherent,
and so incomplete. For the evidence of guilt which they contain is,
after all, slight and indirect, and, moreover, superfluous altogether;
seeing that Mary's guilt was open and palpable, before the supposed
discovery of the letters, to every person at home and abroad who had any
knowledge of the facts. As for the alleged inconsistency of the letters
with proven facts: the answer is, that whosoever wrote the letters would
be more likely to know facts which were taking place around them than any
critic could be one hundred or three hundred years afterwards. But if
these mistakes as to facts actually exist in them, they are only a fresh
argument for their authenticity. Mary, writing in agony and confusion,
might easily make a mistake: forgers would only take too good care to
make none.

But the strongest evidence in favour of the letters and sonnets, in spite
of the arguments of good Dr. Whittaker and other apologists for Mary, is
to be found in their tone. A forger in those coarse days would have made
Mary write in some Semiramis or Roxana vein,