e forefront amongst her accusers. He had been her tutor,
her pensioner. She had heaped him with favours; and, after all, she was
his queen, and a defenceless woman: and yet he returned her kindness, in
the hour of her fall, by invectives fit only for a rancorous and reckless
advocate, determined to force a verdict by the basest arts of oratory.

Now as to the Casket letters. I should have thought they bore in
themselves the best evidence of being genuine. I can add nothing to the
arguments of Mr. Froude and Mr. Burton, save this: that no one clever
enough to be a forger would have put together documents so incoherent,
and so incomplete. For the evidence of guilt which they contain is,
after all, slight and indirect, and, moreover, superfluous altogether;
seeing that Mary's guilt was open and palpable, before the supposed
discovery of the letters, to every person at home and abroad who had any
knowledge of the facts. As for the alleged inconsistency of the letters
with proven facts: the answer is, that whosoever wrote the letters would
be more likely to know facts which were taking place around them than any
critic could be one hundred or three hundred years afterwards. But if
these mistakes as to facts actually exist in them, they are only a fresh
argument for their authenticity. Mary, writing in agony and confusion,
might easily make a mistake: forgers would only take too good care to
make none.

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
versa