mon charity, the reader must be
warned that the exposition is inevitably puzzling and complex. Sprot,
under examination, lied often, lied variously, and, perhaps, lied to the
last. Moreover much, indeed everything, depends here on exact dates, and
Sprot's are loose, as was natural in the circumstances, the events of
which he spoke being so remote in time.

Consequently the results of criticism of his confession may here be
stated with brevity. The persevering student, the reader interested in
odd pictures of domestic life, and in strange human characters may read
on at his own peril. But the actual grains of fact, extracted from tons
of falsehood, may be set down in very few words.

The genuine and hitherto unknown confessions of Sprot add no absolute
certainty as to the existence of a Gowrie conspiracy. His words, when
uncorroborated, can have no weight with a jury. He confessed that _all_
the alleged Logan papers which, up to two days before his death, were in
possession of the Privy Council, were forgeries by himself. But, on
August 10, he announced that he had possessed one _genuine_ letter of
Logan to Gowrie (dated July 29, 1600). That letter (our Letter IV) or a
forged copy was then found in his repositories. Expert evidence,
however, decides that this document, like all the others, is in a
specious imitation of Logan's hand, but that it has other characteristics
of Sprot's own hand, and was penned by Sprot himself. Why he kept it
back so long, why he declared that it alone was genuine, we do not know.
That it _is_ genuine, _in substance_, and was copied by Sprot from a real
letter of Logan's in an imitation of Logan's hand, and that, if so, it
proves Logan's accession to the conspiracy, is my own private opinion.
But that opinion is based on mere literary considerations, on what is
called 'internal evidence,' and is, therefore, purely a matter of
subjective impression, like one's idea of the possible share of
Shakespeare in a play mainly by Fletcher or another. Evidence of this
kind is not historical evidence. It follows that the whole affair of
Sprot, and of the alleged Logan letters, adds nothing certain to the
reasons for believing that there was a Gowrie conspiracy. As far as
Sprot and his documents are concerned, we know that all, as they stand,
are pure fictitious counterfeits by that unhappy man, while, as to
whether one letter (IV) and perhaps another (I) are genuine _in
substance_, every re