ncestuous adultery in which now I wallow, I challenge as of
right the presumption that I am innocent; for the very reason that I am
loaded in my impeachment with crimes that are inhuman, I claim to be no
criminal at all. Because my indictment is revolting and monstrous,
therefore is it incredible. The case, taken apart from the person, would
not (unless through its mysteriousness and imperfect circumstantiation)
have attracted the interest which _has_ given it, and _will_ in all time
coming continue to give it, a root in history amongst insoluble or
doubtfully soluble historical problems. The _case_, being painful and
shocking, would by readers generally have long since been dismissed to
darkness. But the _person_, too critically connected with a vast and
immortal revolution, will for ever call back the case before the
tribunals of earth. The mother of Queen Elizabeth, the mother of
Protestantism in England, cannot be suffered--never _will_ be
suffered--to benefit by that shelter of merciful darkness which, upon
any humbler person, or even upon this person in any humbler case, might
be suffered to settle quietly as regards the memory of her acts. Mr.
Froude, a pure-minded man, is the last man to call back into the glare
of a judicial inquest deeds of horror, over which eternal silence should
have brooded, had such an issue been possible. But three centuries of
discussion have made _that_ more and more impossible. And now,
therefore, with a view to the improvement of the dispute, and, perhaps,
in one or two instances, with a chance for the rectification of the
'_issues_' (speaking juridically) into which the question has been
allowed to lapse, Mr. Froude has in some degree re-opened the
discussion. 'The guilt,' he says, 'must rest where it is due. But under
any hypothesis guilt there _was_--dark, mysterious, and most miserable.'

Tell this story how you may, and the evidence remains of guilt under
_any_ hypothesis--guilt such as in Grecian tragedy was seen thousands
of years ago hanging in clouds of destiny over princely houses, and
reading to them a doom of utter ruin, root and branch, in which, as in
the anarchy of hurricanes, no form or feature was descried
distinctly--nothing but some dim fluctuating phantom, pointing with
recording finger to that one ancestral crime through which the
desolation had been wrought.

Mr. Froude, through his natural sense of justice, and his deep study
of the case, is unfavourably dispo