e than any Niagara, in a headlong course of mingled
misery, exasperation, love, and despair. Before she had even
accomplished the terrible circle of events, and become Bothwell's wife,
it requires no strong effort of the imagination to perceive that the
despair might well have come uppermost, and that Mary fully recognised,
not only the horror, but the futility and wretched failure into which
she had plunged. We do not pretend to believe that there was much to
cause remorse in the mind of such a woman in such an age in the death,
however brought about, of the miserable Darnley. Mary could have brushed
him from her memory like a fly, had that been all. But the rage of
despair and failure was in her soul when she raved like a caged lion
from door to window, imprisoned, trapped, and betrayed, expressing her
incoherent transport of pain to the mob which would have had her blood,
but which, overcome by the spectacle of that supreme and awful passion,
became silent with awe or hushed by a spasm of pity and tears.

So it has remained, a spectacle to all the earth, which the fiercest
assailant and the most rigid judge cannot long contemplate without
yielding to a painful compassion which rends the heart. Why should all
that faculty and force, all that wonderful being, with every capacity
for happiness and making happy, for wise action and beneficent dealing,
for boundless influence and power--why such youth, such strength, such
spirit, equal to every enterprise, should they have been swept away by
that remorseless fate? We can still see the trapped and ruined
Queen--exasperated still further by the consciousness that many of the
men now holding her in bonds were at least as guilty as she, guilty of
Darnley's blood, guilty if not of favouring yet of fearing Bothwell and
yielding their countenance to his plans--pacing that chamber, appearing
at that window, her loveliness, her adornments, and all the wiles of
triumphant beauty forgotten, throwing forth to the earth that was as
brass and the skies that were as iron, like a wild animal in its
torment, her hoarse inarticulate cry. And, whatever we may think of her
merits, that terrible spectacle is more than flesh and blood can bear.
Pity takes the place of wrath and indignation that she alone should
suffer: why not Lethington, Huntly, Athole, and the rest, all those
stern peers who counselled with her upon the most effectual way of
having Darnley removed, the thankless fool who dist