Yet with all this she was not fine in texture, but hardy as a man.  She could endure immense fatigue without yielding to it.  Her supple form had the strength of steel.  There was a gleam in her hazel eyes that showed her to be brimful of an almost fierce vitality.  Young as she was, she was the mistress of a thousand arts, and she exhaled a sort of atmosphere that turned the heads of men.  The Stuart blood made her impatient of control, careless of state, and easy-mannered.  The French and the Tudor strain gave her vivacity.  She could be submissive in appearance while still persisting in her aims.  She could be languorous and seductive while cold within.  Again, she could assume the haughtiness which belonged to one who was twice a queen.

Two motives swayed her, and they fought together for supremacy.  One was the love of power, and the other was the love of love.  The first was natural to a girl who was a sovereign in her own right.  The second was inherited, and was then forced into a rank luxuriance by the sort of life that she had seen about her.  At eighteen she was a strangely amorous creature, given to fondling and kissing every one about her, with slight discrimination.  From her sense of touch she received emotions that were almost necessary to her existence.  With her slender, graceful hands she was always stroking the face of some favorite—­it might be only the face of a child, or it might be the face of some courtier or poet, or one of the four Marys whose names are linked with hers—­ Mary Livingstone, Mary Fleming, Mary Beaton, and Mary Seton, the last of whom remained with her royal mistress until her death.

But one must not be too censorious in thinking of Mary Stuart.  She was surrounded everywhere by enemies.  During her stay in France she was hated by the faction of Catherine de’ Medici.  When she returned to Scotland she was hated because of her religion by the Protestant lords.  Her every action was set forth in the worst possible light.  The most sinister meaning was given to everything she said or did.  In truth, we must reject almost all the stories which accuse her of anything more than a certain levity of conduct.

She was not a woman to yield herself in love’s last surrender unless her intellect and heart alike had been made captive.  She would listen to the passionate outpourings of poets and courtiers, and she would plunge her eyes into theirs, and let her hair just touch their faces, and give them her white hands to kiss—­but that was all.  Even in this she was only following the fashion of the court where she was bred, and she was not unlike her royal relative, Elizabeth of England, who had the same external amorousness coupled with the same internal self-control.

Mary Stuart’s love life makes a piteous story, for it is the life of one who was ever seeking—­seeking for the man to whom she could look up, who could be strong and brave and ardent like herself, and at the same time be more powerful and more steadfast even than she herself in mind and thought.  Whatever may be said of her, and howsoever the facts may be colored by partisans, this royal girl, stung though she was by passion and goaded by desire, cared nothing for any man who could not match her in body and mind and spirit all at once.