: but kindness and charity were not the Christian virtues
most approved in those days.

From this time Buchanan took up with vehemence, and indeed with
violence, the prosecution of Mary, acting often as her accuser, and
always as an active agent, secretary, or commissioner, in the conduct of
the indictment against her. He has been subject on this account to very
hard treatment especially from the recent defenders of the Queen. Mr.
Hosack, in his able book _Mary Queen of Scots and her Accusers_,
denounces him as having offered verses and adulations to the Queen at a
time when, according to his own after-statement, everybody knew her to
be living in shameless vice and corruption. This, however, is not at all
a necessary inference. It might, on the contrary, very well have lent
bitterness to Buchanan's historical record, written after the dreadful
catastrophe which so many accepted as a revelation of Mary's real
character, that he had himself been one of the deceived, who for years
had entertained no suspicion, but accepted the fair seeming as truth.
Such a sentiment is one of the most common in human nature. The friend
deceived becomes the bitterest enemy; and he who has been seduced into
undeserved approval is apt to go farther than the fiercest adversary
when he learns that his own utterances have helped to veil the crime
which he had never suspected the existence of. This motive is enough, we
think, to account for the special virulence with which Buchanan
certainly does assail the Queen, and the passion which thrills through
the _Detectio_, a sort of fury and abhorrence which makes every
paragraph tingle. She had done nothing to Buchanan to rouse any desire
for individual vengeance; and it is more rational, certainly, to believe
that the horror of the discovery inspired with a sort of rage the bosom
of the scholar--rage which was perfectly genuine in its beginning,
though it might, no doubt, be raised to whiter heat by the continually
increasing fervour of partisanship. The curious description of him given
by Sir James Melville (the courtier, not the divine) that "he was easily
abused, and so facile that he was led with any company that he haunted
for the time, which made him factious in his old days; for he spoke and
writ as they that were about him for the time informed him," would, if
accepted, give a still easier solution to this question. But it is a
little difficult to accept such a character of Buchanan, who does