ts occurred there
can be little doubt that the horror and condemnation were almost
unanimous. No reasoning could explain away those wild and mad acts, no
discussion of probability come in. The mob in Edinburgh which raged
against her was checked in its fierceness and subdued to pity at sight
of the wretched lady in her despair, at that awful moment when she
appeared at the window of the Provost's lodging in the High Street, and
made her wild appeal, in all the force of impassioned and terrible
emotion, to the overawed and excited crowd. They saw her in the
carelessness of misery half-dressed, unadorned, disenchanted, and
delivered from the maddening delusion which had carried her away,
recognising in its full extent the horrors of the result--and their
hearts were rent with pity. But notwithstanding that pity and all the
innate chivalry which her sufferings called forth, Edinburgh and
Scotland, the whole alarmed and terrified nation, believed at first the
evidence of their senses. There seems nothing more distinct than this
fact throughout all the trouble and tumult of the moment. It is not to
be taken as an absolute proof of Mary's guilt. Such impressions have
existed in other though less conspicuous cases and have been proved
untrue. But that it did exist universally there can be little doubt.

The scene at the window of the Provost's lodging where the unfortunate
Queen was lodged, near the Nether Bow of Edinburgh, when brought back
from Dunbar after the flight of Bothwell by the angry lords, with the
mob clamouring underneath, and her enemies holding her fate in their
hands, seems to me one of the most significant in her history. No woman
was ever in circumstances more terrible. The situation is stronger if we
suppose her guilt, and that what we see before us is a great spirit
carried away by passion--that something beyond reason, beyond all human
power to restrain, which sometimes binds an angelic woman to a villain,
and sometimes a man of the highest power and wisdom to a lovely trifler
or a fool. It seems to me as at once more consistent with the facts and
with human nature to realise the position of the unhappy Queen as
transported by that overwhelming sentiment, and wrought on the other
side to an impatience almost maddening, by the injuries, follies,
treacheries, and universal provocation of her unworthy husband, until
the force of the bewildering current carried her in a disastrous moment
over a precipice wors