utterly alien to the
tenderness, the delicacy, the pitiful confusion of mind, the conscious
weakness, the imploring and most feminine trust which makes the letters,
to those who--as I do--believe in them, more pathetic than any fictitious
sorrows which poets could invent. More than one touch, indeed, of utter
self-abasement, in the second letter, is so unexpected, so subtle, and
yet so true to the heart of woman, that--as has been well said--if it was
invented there must have existed in Scotland an earlier Shakespeare; who
yet has died without leaving any other sign, for good or evil, of his
dramatic genius.

As for the theory (totally unsupported) that Buchanan forged the poem
usually called the Sonnets; it is paying old Geordie's genius, however
versatile it may have been, too high a compliment to believe that he
could have written both them and the Detection; while it is paying his
shrewdness too low a compliment to believe that he could have put into
them, out of mere carelessness or stupidity, the well-known line, which
seems incompatible with the theory both of the letters and of his own
Detection; and which has ere now been brought forward as a fresh proof of
Mary's innocence.

And, as with the letters, so with the sonnets: their delicacy, their
grace, their reticence, are so many arguments against their having been
forged by any Scot of the sixteenth century, and least of all by one in
whose character--whatever his other virtues may have been--delicacy was
by no means the strongest point.

As for the complaint that Buchanan was ungrateful to Mary, it must be
said: That even if she, and not Murray, had bestowed on him the
temporalities of Crossraguel Abbey four years before, it was merely fair
pay for services fairly rendered; and I am not aware that payment, or
even favours, however gracious, bind any man's soul and conscience in
questions of highest morality and highest public importance. And the
importance of that question cannot be exaggerated. At a moment when
Scotland seemed struggling in death-throes of anarchy, civil and
religious, and was in danger of becoming a prey either to England or to
France, if there could not be formed out of the heart of her a people,
steadfast, trusty, united, strong politically because strong in the fear
of God and the desire of righteousness--at such a moment as this, a crime
had been committed, the like of which had not been heard in Europe since
the tragedy of Joan of