he result was the utter demoralisation, both of France and
Spain. Knox and Buchanan, the one from the standpoint of an old Hebrew
prophet, the other rather from that of a Juvenal or a Tacitus, tried the
other method, and called acts by their just names, appealing alike to
conscience and to God. The result was virtue and piety, and that manly
independence of soul which is thought compatible with hearty loyalty, in
a country labouring under heavy disadvantages, long divided almost into
two hostile camps, two rival races.

And the good influence was soon manifest, not only in those who sided
with Buchanan and his friends, but in those who most opposed them. The
Roman Catholic preachers, who at first asserted Mary's right to impurity
while they allowed her guilt, grew silent for shame, and set themselves
to assert her entire innocence; while the Scots who have followed their
example have, to their honour, taken up the same ground. They have
fought Buchanan on the ground of fact, not on the ground of morality:
they have alleged--as they had a fair right to do--the probability of
intrigue and forgery in an age so profligate: the improbability that a
Queen so gifted by nature and by fortune, and confessedly for a long
while so strong and so spotless, should as it were by a sudden insanity
have proved so untrue to herself. Their noblest and purest sympathies
have been enlisted--and who can blame them?--in loyalty to a Queen,
chivalry to a woman, pity for the unfortunate and--as they conceived--the
innocent; but whether they have been right or wrong in their view of
facts, the Scotch partisans of Mary have always--as far as I know--been
right in their view of morals; they have never deigned to admit Mary's
guilt, and then to palliate it by those sentimental, or rather sensual,
theories of human nature, too common in a certain school of French
literature, too common, alas! in a certain school of modern English
novels. They have not said, "She did it; but after all, was the deed so
very inexcusable?" They have said, "The deed was inexcusable: but she
did not do it." And so the Scotch admirers of Mary, who have numbered
among them many a pure and noble, as well as many a gifted spirit, have
kept at least themselves unstained; and have shown, whether consciously
or not, that they too share in that sturdy Scotch moral sense which has
been so much strengthened--as I believe by the plain speech of good old
George Buchanan.