THE

NORTH BRITISH REVIEW.

NOVEMBER, 1845.

ART. I.—1. Letters of Mary Queen of Scots, and Documents connected with her Personal History, now first published. With an Introduction. By AGNES STRICKLAND, author of the Lives of the Queens of England. 3 vols. 1842-3. London. 2. Memoirs of Mary Stuart Queen of Scotland. By L. STANHOPE F. BUCKINGHAM. 2 vols. London, 1844.

3. Letters of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland, selected from the "Recueil des Lettres de Marie Stuart," together with the Chronological Summary of events during the reign of the Queen of Scotland. By PRINCE ALEXANDER LABANOFF. Translated, with Notes and an Introduction. By WILLIAM TURNBULL, Esq., Advocate, F.S.A., Scot. London, 1845.

4. History of Scotland. By PATRICK FRASER TYTLER, Esq. 9 vols. Edinburgh, 1839-1843.

THE numerous volumes that are almost daily spawned, relative to the days of Mary Stuart, proclaim the undying interest of the world, in one of the most extraordinary portions of its history. Old and young, male and female, foreigner and native, the didactic historian, the writer of memoirs, the collector of letters, and the general" gatherer of other men's stuff," have poured forth their sense or nonsense upon the prolific theme. Each too has some peculiar merit; each professes to give the correct story; each has made some grand discovery hitherto overlooked, or struck out some philosophical views, around which the sluggish imaginations of his predecessors had toiled in vain. Mr. L. Stanhope F. Buckingham gives " a personal memoir of the Scottish Queen, embracing, what none had done before, the essence of that long and vehement controversy;" and he "combines together, for the first time, the personal incidents of Mary's remarkable and romantic career." To set opposite to such high recommendations, Miss Strickland appears laden with "correspondence new to the public; and that which is not absolutely so, is now for the first time presented in a collective form, and

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in language comprehensible by the general reader." Her volumes contain, too," other letters and contemporary records of equal interest, many of them hitherto inedited, and for the most part translated for the first time." Mr. Turnbull partly admits, and partly denies this; Miss Strickland's book contains, according to him, many omissions, and is wretchedly translated; his own being the genuine article. Mr. Tytler again, has traced the history "with greater detail than former writers," seeing that "he had access to a large mass of manuscript materials, of which the greater part has been hitherto unprinted and unexamined;" and he has thus been "enabled to throw more light upon this division of the work, and to recover from the waste of conjecture and obscurity, some portions of Scottish history which were lost."

"The work," says Dr. Johnson, "is performed, first by railing at the stupidity, negligence, ignorance, and asinine tastelessness of the former editors, showing from all that goes before, and all that follows, the inelegance and absurdity of the former reading; then by proposing something, which to superficial readers would seem specious, but which the editor rejects with indignation; then by producing the true reading, with a long paraphrase, and concluding with loud acclamations on the discovery, and a sober wish for the advancement and prosperity of genuine criticism.” Amid this eternal war, we have had dissertations recommended neither by their interest nor their moral utility, though truth has sometimes been struck out from the collision of discordant opinion. It is difficult indeed to write the history, or to read it, without sliding into the spirit of partizanship. When one seeks to preserve the cool impartiality of literary judges, and to treat the story with the indifference of stoical impartiality, an under-current of feeling rises to the surface of our thoughts, on which all our philosophy floats away. It is in vain that we recall the great interests that were involved, or the mighty convulsions of those old days, which centuries only laid at rest. Other influences put to flight sobriety of thought; imagination renders the past contest of party, a struggle of the present; and the reason is checked in its duty of censure or of praise.

The forty-five years from the Reformation in 1560, to the union of the crowns in 1605, is crowded with incidents for the politician, who wishes facts for any theory, or for the moral philosopher who wants examples to illustrate his general specula tions on the virtues and infirmities of humanity. For men of softer natures, there will not be found a page of history, so calculated to rouse the contending emotions of admiration and astonishment, or to wound sensibility by horror and indignation. They have a subject inexhaustible in extraordinary revolutions in opinion, and terrible reverses in fortune, when the worn-out prejudices of the middle age slipped from life to history, and

families who had flourished through ages of prosperity, were pushed aside, and were heard of no more. It is a noble theme for a historian who can estimate its spirit. It affords him scope for his highest powers of graphic narrative, or his profoundest reach of philosophical reflection. All the wonders are here that imagination would have created, had it left itself untrammelled to create a story in the precincts of times, of the events of which there is no record. Everything to excite attention by pleasing variety, to instruct the mind not by speculation but by example, and to meliorate the heart by a story which will never fail to find sympathies there.

Unhappy Mary! over whose sad story of unequalled misery no philosophy can prevent the tears of sensibility to flow, and no difference of creed can stifle the compassion of humanity at fallen greatness. What a long Iliad of woes was that life, chequered with self-implanted miseries-a life which blazed with so much lustre at its opening, and went down amid such clouds of sorrow. The scene of rapid change passes before us with a speed that hides the connexion between each Act of a drama, where princes were the players, and the spectators the world. The proclaimed queen of three great nations was, in a few little years, driven from her home in the noon-day of her youth and beauty, with cries of vengeance echoing in her ears, and a long captivity and ignominious death awaiting her at last. The coldest nature, and the most cynic philosophy, will admit that there is something touching in the story of a girl who had the warm affections of a kind heart, and all that we ever associate with human loveliness; whose errors were the result of no native depravity, but which met with so speedy and dreadful a reckoning.

History and tradition, and impressions which are transmitted from age to age by a medium imperceptible to analysis, have, in one mode or another, done their best to satiate human curiosity. We can follow Mary, step by step, from the first outburst of ad miration of the cavaliers of France,

"In life's morning march when her spirit was young," to her melancholy end. We know her life as thoroughly as we can ever know the past; her story sinks into the mind and nestles there like some of the nursery tales of early childhood, that come rising up from their long hiding place, when, amid the rugged scenes of life, the chord is struck that sends us back upon reminiscences.

We read the strange history again and again, and as each stirring incident appears, one can scarce imagine himself engaged in the study of things that once agitated human hearts, and had been productive of real destinies. Genius has contrived to weave out of it a tale; but how tame has even Schiller made

the copy, and how vapid is Scott's narrative beside the truth! Her own letters tell her history, with a dreadful sincerity and mournful pathos, that has never been surpassed by the best passages of the masters who have portrayed the workings of a wounded and distempered heart. Not so, however, with our manufacturers of memoirs, biographies, and dissertations. The endeavour with them has been, not to expiscate the truth. That would have been an idle and a useless task. Theory here makes sad ravage with history, under the guidance of a logic which stalks to its conclusions with an irresistible contempt of facts. The ordinary sources of past history are too narrow for their warm and enthusiastic imaginations. We are now to deal with writers who fly extra flammantia mania mundi, into the regions of conjecture. Laden with the stores acquired by imagination in its travels, they are positive and decided even on unattainable knowledge, and can develop at once the glories that are fallen, and invest with a superior pomp the beings they exalt, or correspondingly depress the villains, conspirators, and fanatical desperados they condemn.

It is not one point that these writers and their predecessors have involved in doubt. They compel controversy to attend Mary from her cradle to her grave, and render her story one of those unhappy subjects that can only be looked at from the extremes of human feeling. We scarce leave with moistened eyes the tale of suffering unmerited, and the good points of character exaggerated to falsehood, when our hearts are turned to stone at the narrative of crime unpunished, humanity trampled on, and the decencies of life outraged and despised, in the wild gratification of flagitious passion.

The Letters of Queen Mary, with which Miss Strickland has favoured us, are a selection from several tomes, put together by the industry of Alexander Labanoff, a Russian prince. Those that are new are of no great importance. Aware of this, Miss Strickland has interweaved with them a number of the interesting letters long ago published by Robertson and Keith, and has endeavoured to render her story connected by a short abridgment of Mary's history. To the whole she has prefixed a long introduction, and added many pages of appendix, and, by writing several times of her intentions in regard to "future editions," she indicates her opinion, that her own high estimate of her labours will only be in unison with that of the public.

The public are sometimes blind, and often capricious; but, in the present instance, we are afraid that such sanguine anticipations will be disappointed. We would wish to speak with all gentleness of a lady, and to pass over in silence, if we could not approve, the productions of her genius. But Miss Strickland's is

a special case. She is a practised authoress, who favours the public, as each revolving lustrum passes, with thick volumes of history, which have a certain circulation, and necessarily exercise a little influence. She is, moreover, not unaccustomed to criticism; and in the present case, by her assumption of excellence, and by the tone and temper in which she writes, she has resigned the privileges which we would otherwise be the first willingly to concede.

Speaking of the accusers of the Queen, Miss Strickland has well observed, that "they would have been wonderfully improved by the castigation of our present periodical press,"-(vol. iii., p. 255,) -an observation which we cite here with the view of justifying ourselves in giving a few specimens of her capacity for historical investigation, and in assisting her in the labour of revisal for those numerous editions that will be called for by an anxious public. Some of the points we have noticed, in the cursory glance we have given to her volumes, may be considered unimportant; but in a work destined to such a wide popularity, it is best to be correct in regard to every particular.

We are informed very early, that "the divorce of Bothwell from Jane Gordon, sister of the Earl of Huntly, was declared at the same time in the Consistory and the Archiepiscopal Court," (vol. i., p. 33.) Both were Consistory Courts; and Miss Strickland means to say, that the divorce was carried through in the Consistory Court of the Archbishop, and in the Consistory Court of the Commissaries. In the next page, she writes of something having been done "in presence of the Lords of Sessions," (p. 34.) A strange use is made of Parliament in another place, for "the Queen convokes a Parliament in order to bring to trial" the murderers of the King, (p. 28.) Rizzio's murder took place "in the drawing-room of the Queen at the Castle of Edinburgh," (vol. i., p. 226.) Mary, on her arrival from France, "disembarks at Leith, having escaped the vessels of Queen Elizabeth, which, however, took one of her galleys. Having made a short stay at the Abbey of Lislebourg, she proceeds to Edinburgh," (vol. i., p. 7.) Lislebourg was the French name for Edinburgh, as it was then surrounded by so many lochs. The Queen, therefore, first "makes a short stay at" Edinburgh, and then proceeds to Edinburgh!" Mary appoints James Murray (her natural brother,) and Maitland, her prime ministers," (vol. i., p. 7.) This, we presume, is James Stuart, Earl of Murray. After the battle of Carberry Hill, "the tyrants took her (the Queen) to the Kirkat-field, and shut her up in the house where her husband's corpse had been carried, after his murder, and had laid till his burial," (vol. iii., p. 28.) The Queen was first taken to the Provost's house, and then carried to Holyrood Palace--(Tytler, vol. vii., p, 112,)—which evidently affords no room for heroics