especially, one on
Isaiah, and a new revised edition of the "Institutes." "I must be bold
on your liberality," he writes, "not only in that, but in greater things
as I shall need."[112] On her part she applies to him for spiritual
advice, not after the manner of the drooping Mrs. Bowes, but in a more
positive spirit,--advice as to practical points, advice as to the Church
of England, for instance, whose ritual he condemns as a
"mingle-mangle."[113] Just at the end she ceases to write, sends him "a
token, without writing." "I understand your impediment," he answers,
"and therefore I cannot complain. Yet if you understood the variety of
my temptations, I doubt not but you would have written somewhat."[114]
One letter more, and then silence.

And I think the best of the Reformer died out with that correspondence.
It is after this, of course, that he wrote that ungenerous description
of his intercourse with Mrs. Bowes. It is after this, also, that we come
to the unlovely episode of his second marriage. He had been left a
widower at the age of fifty-five. Three years after, it occurred
apparently to yet another pious parent to sacrifice a child upon the
altar of his respect for the Reformer. In January, 1563, Randolph writes
to Cecil: "Your Honour will take it for a great wonder when I shall
write unto you that Mr. Knox shall marry a very near kinswoman of the
Duke's, a Lord's daughter, a young lass not above sixteen years of
age."[115] He adds that he fears he will be laughed at for reporting so
mad a story. And yet it was true; and on Palm Sunday, 1564, Margaret
Stewart, daughter of Andrew Lord Stewart of Ochiltree, aged seventeen,
was duly united to John Knox, Minister of St. Giles's Kirk, Edinburgh,
aged fifty-nine,--to the great disgust of Queen Mary from family pride,
and I would fain hope of many others for more humane considerations. "In
this," as Randolph says, "I wish he had done otherwise." The Consistory
of Geneva, "that most perfect school of Christ that ever was on earth
since the days of the Apostles," were wont to forbid marriages on the
ground of too great a disproportion in age. I cannot help wondering
whether the old Reformer's conscience did not uneasily remind him, now
and again, of this good custom of his religious metropolis, as he
thought of the two-and-forty years that separated him from his poor
bride. Fitly enough, we hear nothing of the second Mrs. Knox until she
appears at her husband's deathbed,