word, be called society, that men are less disposed to believe in
the existence of monstrous and hideous evil, that they do not attach an
undue importance to trifles nor take levity for vice. Knox had all the
limitations of mind natural to his humble origin, and his profession,
and the special disadvantage which must attach to the habit of
investigating by means of popular accusation and gossip, problematical
cases of immorality. He was able to believe that the Queen, when retired
into her private apartments with her ladies, indulged in "skipping not
very comelie for honest women," and that all kinds of brutal orgies went
on at court--incidents certainly unnecessary to prove her after-guilt,
and entirely out of keeping with all the surrounding associations, as if
Holyrood had been a changehouse in "Christ Kirk on the green." It did
not offend his sense of the probable or likely that such insinuations
should be made, and he recorded them accordingly not as insinuations but
as facts, in a manner only possible to that conjoint force of ignorance
and scorn which continually makes people of one class misconceive and
condemn those of another. Dancing was in those days the most decorous of
performances: but if Mary had been proved to have danced a stately _pas
seul_ in a minuet, it was to Knox, who knew no better, as if she had
indulged in the wildest bobbing of a country fair--nay, he would
probably have thought the high-skipping rural performer by far the more
innocent of the two.

This is but an instance of many similar misconceptions with which the
colour of the picture is heightened. An impassioned spectator looking on
with a foregone conclusion in his mind, never apparently able to
convince himself that vice does not always wear her trappings, but is
probably much more dangerous when she observes the ordinary modesties of
outward life, is always apt to be misled in this way. The state of
affairs in which a great body of public men, not only ministers, but
noble men and worthy persons of every degree, could personally address
the Queen, and that almost in the form of an accusation couched in the
most vehement terms, because of a libertine raid made by a few young
gallants in the night, on a house supposed to be inhabited by a woman of
damaged character, is inconceivable to us--a certain parochial
character, a pettiness as of a village, thus comes into the great
national struggle. The Queen's uncle, who had accompanied her