ife 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.

It was in her early widowhood that she first met the man, and when
their union came it brought ruin on them both. In France there came to
her one day one of her own subjects, the Earl of Bothwell. He was but a
few year