Maister John had many friends among the
courtiers. But now while he waited the Queen's pleasure, not knowing
perhaps if she might not send him to the Castle or the Tolbooth in her
wrath, all his fine acquaintances forsook him. He stood, "the said
John," for an hour in that bustling ante-room, "as one whom men had
never seen," only Lord Ochiltree who had come to Holyrood with him, and
whose daughter he was about to marry, giving any sign of acquaintance to
the disgraced preacher. And Knox was human: he loved the cold shade as
little as any man, and the impertinences of all those butterfly
courtiers moved him as such a man ought not to have been moved. He burst
out suddenly upon the ladies who sat and whispered and tittered among
themselves (no doubt) at his discomfiture. He would not have us think
even then that his mind was disturbed; he merely said--

"Oh fayr Ladies, how pleasant were this life of yours if it should
ever abide, and then in the end that we might pass to heaven with
all this gay gear! But fie upon that Knave Death that will come
whether we will or not. And when he has laid on his arrest the foul
worms will be busy with this flesh be it never so fayre and so
tender, and the silly soul, I fear, shall be so feeble that it can
neither carry with it gold garnissing, tarjetting, pearls, nor
precious stones!"

Knox was never called to the royal presence more, nor did Mary ever
forgive him the exhibition of feminine weakness into which his severity
had driven her. It was intolerable, no doubt, to her pride to have been
betrayed into those tears, to have seen through them the same immovable
countenance which had yielded to none of her arguments and cared nothing
for her anger, and to have him finally compare her to his own boys whom
his own hands corrected--the blubbering of schoolboys to the tears of a
queen! There is perhaps always a mixture of the tragi-comic in every
such scene, and this humiliating comparison, obtusely intended as a sort
of blundering apology, but which brought the Queen's exasperation and
mortification to a climax, and Knox's bitter assault upon the ladies in
their fine dresses outside, give a humiliating poignancy to the
exasperated feeling on both sides such as delights a cynic. It was the
end of all personal encounter between the Queen and the preacher. She
did not forgive him, and did her best to punish: but in their last and
only subsequent meeting, K