tile 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 Naples. All Europe stood aghast. The honour of
the Scottish nation was at stake. More than Mary or Bothwell were known
to be implicated in the deed; and--as Buchanan puts it in the opening of
his "De Jure Regni"--"The fault of some few was charged upon all; and the
common hatred of a particular person did redound to the whole nation; so
that even such as were remote from any suspicion were inflamed by the
infamy of men's crimes." {17}

To vindicate the national honour, and to punish the guilty, as well as to
save themselves from utter anarchy, the great majority of the Scotch
nation had taken measures against Mary which required explicit
justification in the sight of Europe, as Buchanan frankly confesses in
the opening of his "De Jure Regni." The chi