rts of Scotland had been up to this
point a native race entirely Scots in training as in birth, and bent
above all things upon the progress and consolidation of their own
ancient kingdom, the poor but proud; a speck all but lost in the
distance of the seas, yet known all over Christendom wherever errant
squires or chivalrous pretensions were known. But the new sovereign of
Scotland was one whose heart and pride were elsewhere, whose favourite
ambitions were directed beyond the limits of that ancient kingdom with
which she had none of the associations of youth, and to which she came a
stranger from another Court far more dazzling and splendid, with hopes
and prospects incapable of being concentrated within the boundary of the
Tweed. There is no indication that the much-contested history of Mary
Stewart has lost any of its interest during the progress of the
intermediate centuries; on the contrary, some of its questions are
almost more hotly contested now than they were at the moment when they
arose. Her chivalrous defenders are more bold than once they were, and
though the tone of her assailants is subdued, it is from a natural
softening of sentiment towards the past, and still more from the fashion
of our time, which finds an absorbing interest in the manifestations of
individual character and the discussion of individual motives, rather
than from any change of opinion. I do not venture to enter into that
long-continued conflict, or to attempt to decide for the hundredth time
whether a woman so gifted and unfortunate was more or less guilty. Both
parties have gone, and still go, too far in that discussion; and Mary
would not have thanked (I imagine) those partisans who would prove her
innocence at the cost of all those vigorous and splendid qualities which
made her remarkable. She could scarcely be at once an unoffending victim
and one of the ablest women of her time.

As this is the most interesting of all the epochs of Scottish
history--and that not for Mary's sake alone, but for the wonderful
conflict going on apart from her, and in which her tragic career is but
an episode--so it is the most exciting and picturesque period in the
records of Edinburgh, which was then in its fullest splendour of
architectural beauty and social life; its noble streets more crowded,
more gay, more tumultuous and tragical; its inhabitants more
characteristic and individual; the scenes taking place within it more
dramatic and exciting tha