not
seem to have been a man easily put off from his own way, especially when
taken in conjunction with the Assembly's minute, recording his election
as president "for eschewing of confusion in reasoning." It is more easy
to believe the statement that he was "extreme vengeable against any man
that offended him, which was his greatest fault."

The much darker accusation against Buchanan, that he was a party to, or
indeed the most active agent in, the forging of certain letters reported
to have been sent by Mary to Bothwell before Darnley's murder, and known
far and wide as the Casket Letters, seems to rest upon nothing but
conjecture. He was one of the few members of the party who possessed the
literary gift, the only one, perhaps, except Lethington, whom Mr.
Skelton has presented to us as not only a very enlightened statesman,
but at all times the faithful servant of Mary, but who is accused by
earlier writers of much tergiversation and falsehood. He it was,
according to Chalmers, who was the forger, reaching the summit of
wickedness "in forging his mistress's handwriting for the odious purpose
of convicting her of the crime of aggravated murder." Chalmers was as
sturdy a champion of Mary's innocence in the eighteenth as Mr. Skelton
is in the nineteenth century, but the conduct of historical research has
very much altered in the meantime. The changes have been rung between
Lethington and Buchanan by various critics, but the last light upon the
subject seems to be that there is none, and that if the letters were
forged the forger at least cannot be identified by any art known to
history.

It is unnecessary to pursue the question, or to bring further arguments
to prove that nothing else in Buchanan's writings indicates the
possession of such dramatic and constructive power as would be necessary
for the production of such a letter as that professedly written from
Glasgow, which is by far the most important of the contents of the
Casket. A woman's distracted soul, divided between passion and shame,
the very exaltation of guilty self-abandonment and the horror of
conscious depravity and despair, is not a thing which can be imagined or
embodied by the first ready pen, or even able intellect. No one of all
the tumultuous band that directed affairs in Scotland has given us any
reason to suppose that he was capable of it. Its very contradictions,
those changes of mood and feeling which the most ignorant reader can
perceive, ar