pardonable weaknesses.  The result was the utter demoralisation, both of France and Spain.  Knox and Buchanan, the one from the standpoint of an old Hebrew prophet, the other rather from that of a Juvenal or a Tacitus, tried the other method, and called acts by their just names, appealing alike to conscience and to God.  The result was virtue and piety, and that manly independence of soul which is thought compatible with hearty loyalty, in a country labouring under heavy disadvantages, long divided almost into two hostile camps, two rival races.

And the good influence was soon manifest, not only in those who sided with Buchanan and his friends, but in those who most opposed them.  The Roman Catholic preachers, who at first asserted Mary’s right to impurity while they allowed her guilt, grew silent for shame, and set themselves to assert her entire innocence; while the Scots who have followed their example have, to their honour, taken up the same ground.  They have fought Buchanan on the ground of fact, not on the ground of morality:  they have alleged—­as they had a fair right to do—­the probability of intrigue and forgery in an age so profligate:  the improbability that a Queen so gifted by nature and by fortune, and confessedly for a long while so strong and so spotless, should as it were by a sudden insanity have proved so untrue to herself.  Their noblest and purest sympathies have been enlisted—­and who can blame them?—­in loyalty to a Queen, chivalry to a woman, pity for the unfortunate and—­as they conceived—­the innocent; but whether they have been right or wrong in their view of facts, the Scotch partisans of Mary have always—­as far as I know—­been right in their view of morals; they have never deigned to admit Mary’s guilt, and then to palliate it by those sentimental, or rather sensual, theories of human nature, too common in a certain school of French literature, too common, alas! in a certain school of modern English novels.  They have not said, “She did it; but after all, was the deed so very inexcusable?” They have said, “The deed was inexcusable:  but she did not do it.”  And so the Scotch admirers of Mary, who have numbered among them many a pure and noble, as well as many a gifted spirit, have kept at least themselves unstained; and have shown, whether consciously or not, that they too share in that sturdy Scotch moral sense which has been so much strengthened—­as I believe by the plain speech of good old George Buchanan.

FOOTNOTES

{1} This lecture was delivered in America in 1874.

{2} Black, translator of Mallett’s “Northern Antiquities,” Supplementary Chapter I., and Rafn’s “Antiquitates Americanae.”

{3} On the Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz.

{4} This lecture was given in America in 1874.

{5} This lecture was given in America in 1874.

{6} This lecture and the two preceding ones, being published after the author’s death, have not had the benefit of his corrections.