f poor Mary, were possible enough--as
no one knew better than Buchanan--in that very French court in which Mary
had been brought up; things as ugly were possible in Scotland then, and
for at least a century later; and while we may hope that Buchanan has
overstated his case, we must not blame him too severely for yielding to a
temptation common to all men of genius when their creative power is
roused to its highest energy by a great cause and a great indignation.

And that the genius was there, no man can doubt; one cannot read that
"hideously eloquent" description of Kirk o' Field, which Mr. Burton has
well chosen as a specimen of Buchanan's style, without seeing that we are
face to face with a genius of a very lofty order: not, indeed, of the
loftiest--for there is always in Buchanan's work, it seems to me, a want
of unconsciousness, and a want of tenderness--but still a genius worthy
to be placed beside those ancient writers from whom he took his manner.
Whether or not we agree with his contemporaries, who say that he equalled
Virgil in Latin poetry, we may place him fairly as a prose writer by the
side of Demosthenes, Cicero, or Tacitus. And so I pass from this painful
subject; only quoting--if I may be permitted to quote--Mr. Burton's 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 one part, the 'Detectio Mariae Reginae' in
another; and this contrast is, no doubt, a faithful parallel of the
reaction in the popular mind. This reaction seems to have been general,
and not limited to the Protestant party; for the conditions under which
it became almost a part of the creed of the Church of Rome to believe in
her innocence had not arisen."

If Buchanan, as some of his detractors have thought, raised himself by
subserviency to the intrigues of the