Burton, there is no need
to allude to it further, save where Buchanan's name is concerned. One
may now have every sympathy with Mary Stuart; one may regard with awe a
figure so stately, so tragic, in one sense so heroic,--for she reminds
one rather of the heroine of an old Greek tragedy, swept to her doom by
some irresistible fate, than of a being of our own flesh and blood, and
of our modern and Christian times. One may sympathise with the great
womanhood which charmed so many while she was alive; which has charmed,
in later years, so many noble spirits who have believed in her innocence,
and have doubtless been elevated and purified by their devotion to one
who seemed to them an ideal being. So far from regarding her as a
hateful personage, one may feel oneself forbidden to hate a woman whom
God may have loved, and may have pardoned, to judge from the punishment
so swift, and yet so enduring, which He inflicted. At least, he must so
believe who holds that punishment is a sign of mercy; that the most
dreadful of all dooms is impunity. Nay, more, those "Casket" letters and
sonnets may be a relief to the mind of one who believes in her guilt on
other grounds; a relief when one finds in them a tenderness, a sweetness,
a delicacy, a magnificent self-sacrifice, however hideously misplaced,
which shows what a womanly heart was there; a heart which, joined to that
queenly brain, might have made her a blessing and a glory to Scotland,
had not the whole character been warped and ruinate from childhood, by an
education so abominable, that anyone who knows what words she must have
heard, what scenes she must have beheld in France, from her youth up,
will wonder that she sinned so little: not that she sinned so much. One
may feel, in a word, that there is every excuse for those who have
asserted Mary's innocence, because their own high-mindedness shrank from
believing her guilty: but yet Buchanan, in his own place and time, may
have felt as deeply that he could do no otherwise than he did.

The charges against him, as all readers of Scotch literature know well,
may be reduced to two heads. 1st. The letters and sonnets were
forgeries. Maitland of Lethington may have forged the letters; Buchanan,
according to some, the sonnets. Whoever forged them, Buchanan made use
of them in his Detection, knowing them to be forged. 2nd. Whether Mary
was innocent or not, Buchanan acted a base and ungrateful part in putting
himself in th