thout ruth, and assumes the most criminal and degrading motives
throughout. Its intention clearly is to convince Scotland, England, and
the world of Mary's utter depravity, and the impossibility of any excuse
for her or argument in her favour. The strong and fiery indignation in
it is indeed lessened in effect, at least to us in these latter days, by
the over strength of the indictment; and the reader who turns from the
perusal of the Glasgow letter--which damns indeed yet rouses a world of
conflicting feelings, awe and terror and pity for the lost soul thus
tragically self-condemned--to the historical document in which the
charges against the Queen are authoritatively set forth, cannot fail to
be struck by the difference. It is far from being simple abhorrence with
which we regard the revelation of the one, but in the other there is no
light; the picture is inhuman and impossible in its utter blackness, the
guilt imputed to the Queen is systematic, unimpassioned, the mere
commonplace of an utterly depraved nature. The wild emotion and terrible
impulse in her becomes mere vulgar vice in her accuser's hands. In this
there is nothing wonderful, nothing out of the common course of nature,
which is prone to make every indictment more bitter than the facts that
prove it.

But it may well be believed that it was something of a fierce
consolation to the high-tempered and strong-speaking Scots, in the rush
of universal popular condemnation, to believe and assert that the Queen,
who had so disappointed and disenchanted all her well-wishers, had been
bad through and through, indecent and shameless. The inclination, almost
the wish, to think the worst of every fallen idol has not died out with
the generation which condemned Mary Stewart; and Buchanan was the
spokesman, the advocate of the other party, whose conduct could only be
justified by the establishment of her guilt. If she were not guilty,
they were traitors. If all the proof against her was but a mass of
distorted facts and false swearing, nothing in the way of punishment was
too bad for her unfaithful subjects. A mistake was impossible, the
struggle was one of life and death. The spokesman in such a tremendous
issue, the narrator and setter forth of the terrible question,
especially if he is a person whose trade it is to write, and who can be
accused of doing his work for hire, is always at a disadvantage. It can
never be proved to the vulgar mind that he has not formed hi