But the strongest evidence in favour of the letters and sonnets, in spite of the arguments of good Dr. Whittaker and other apologists for Mary, is to be found in their tone.  A forger in those coarse days would have made Mary write in some Semiramis or Roxana vein, utterly alien to the tenderness, the delicacy, the pitiful confusion of mind, the conscious weakness, the imploring and most feminine trust which makes the letters, to those who—­as I do—­believe in them, more pathetic than any fictitious sorrows which poets could invent.  More than one touch, indeed, of utter self-abasement, in the second letter, is so unexpected, so subtle, and yet so true to the heart of woman, that—­as has been well said—­if it was invented there must have existed in Scotland an earlier Shakespeare; who yet has died without leaving any other sign, for good or evil, of his dramatic genius.

As for the theory (totally unsupported) that Buchanan forged the poem usually called the Sonnets; it is paying old Geordie’s genius, however versatile it may have been, too high a compliment to believe that he could have written both them and the Detection; while it is paying his shrewdness too low a compliment to believe that he could have put into them, out of mere carelessness or stupidity, the well-known line, which seems incompatible with the theory both of the letters and of his own Detection; and which has ere now been brought forward as a fresh proof of Mary’s innocence.

And, as with the letters, so with the sonnets:  their delicacy, their grace, their reticence, are so many arguments against their having been forged by any Scot of the sixteenth century, and least of all by one in whose character—­whatever his other virtues may have been—­delicacy was by no means the strongest point.

As for the complaint that Buchanan was ungrateful to Mary, it must be said:  That even if she, and not Murray, had bestowed on him the temporalities of Crossraguel Abbey four years before, it was merely fair pay for services fairly rendered; and I am not aware that payment, or even favours, however gracious, bind any man’s soul and conscience in questions of highest morality and highest public importance.  And the importance of that question cannot be exaggerated.  At a moment when Scotland seemed struggling in death-throes of anarchy, civil and religious, and was in danger of becoming a prey either to England or to France, if there could not be formed out of the heart of her a people, steadfast, trusty, united, strong politically because strong in the fear of God and the desire of righteousness—­at such a moment as this, a crime had been committed, the like of which had not been heard in Europe since the tragedy of Joan of Naples.  All Europe stood aghast.  The honour of the Scottish nation was at stake.  More than Mary or Bothwell were known to be implicated in the deed; and—­as Buchanan puts it in the opening of his ’De Jure Regni’—­“The fault of some few was charged upon all; and the common hatred of a particular person did redound to the whole nation; so that even such as were remote from any suspicion were inflamed by the infamy of men’s crimes.” {343}