Nor can their persistent ill-luck be traced to lack of capacity; for there was hardly a member of the family who was not bright, energetic, virile : "The Stuarts, intellectually if not morally, were immensely above the average. They were not merely men and women of conspicuous courage; they were men and women of conspicuous capacity. They were poets, fluent writers and speakers, brilliant soldiers, able administrators. They were resolved from first to last to hold their own; and they had a high conception of the kingly dignity, and of the absolute immunity from criticism of a divinely appointed ruler; yet they were not arrogant. Easy of access, affable, quick at jest or repartee, they had all the graceful qualities which win the love, if not the confidence, of the masses. The engaging address of the Stuarts attained perhaps its finest expression in Mary; but each could exert on occasion the enchantment whereby men are bewitched.' In their hours of leisure they liked to mix with the crowd; and instead of holding themselves aloof from the commonalty, it might be nearer the truth to say that they were not unfrequently plebeian in their tastes. Mary, we are told, was 'somewhat sad when solitary'; and though none of them were sullen or morose, as moonstruck monarchs have been, there was a strain of gravity and even of melancholy in their moods; but it could not wholly cloud their constitutional gaiety. Surrounded as they were by a treacherous and turbulent nobility, they had to be patient, reticent, watchful, alert; and the strain told upon them in the end; but they were always eager to escape from the tedious conventions of the Court to the freedom and homeliness of a country life; and when they unbent they unbent wholly. Then they were like children out for a holiday; and it is only fair to add that though the mirth on these occasions might become fast and furious, it seldom degenerated into the unseemly licence and gross buffoonery which were common in the households of the greater nobles. It was kept in due restraint by a native good taste which had been sedulously cultivated, and which was offended by boorish immodesty and clownish indecorum. They liked to have poets and scholars and minstrels about them the Dunbars, and Lindsays, and Buchanans; and spite of complaints, made perhaps more in jest than in earnest, which have been preserved, they appear to have dealt liberally by them.' There were great men in Greece before Agamemnon, and the history of Scotland does not begin with the Stuarts. Mrs Oliphant's sketch of the saintly Margaret is quick with life and colour; but we are hardly prepared to agree with her when she says, "Before Margaret there is little but fable." Such an assertion is hardly fair to the eminent antiquaries who have earliest records. been recently at work upon our The admirable industry of Mr Skene and other Celtic scholars has unquestionably thrown a flood of light upon the condition of the Scot before his institutions were feudalised; and the glimpses that we get into that remote society are full of interest and entertainment. Nor are we prepared to admit that Scotland, prior to the War of Independence, was the home of a savage and barbarous people. The period extending over several generations, from the time when Norman knights and nobles flocked to the Court of King David to the time when the Maiden of Norway died on her homeward voyage, was, speaking generally, a peaceful and prosperous age, on which the later annalists, who lived during the long anarchy and licence of the English wars, looked back with unfeigned regret. The "blast" which burst when Alexander the Third's horse stumbled upon the cliff at Kinghorn, swept away the earlier civilisation of Scotland. That the Stuarts did much to re pair the evil is true, and Mrs Oliphant's eulogy of the Jameses is not perhaps overstrained : "With one exception, and that doubtful-for a man may be weak and may not be brave without being a bad man or even king-every bearer of this fated name laboured with courage and constancy at the great work of elevating his country. Another for Hector!' cried the Highland warrior when his young chief was in danger, and all the world has read the story with moistened eyes. Another for Scotland! had been the cry of the house of Stewart throughout more than a century. As one man fell he handed the sword to another; to an infant hand trained amid feuds and anarchy, but always clasping, as soon as it had force enough, the royal weapon with royal courage and meaning. None of the Jameses lived beyond the earliest chapter of middle age; all of them succeeded in early youth, most of them in childhood; and, with but that uncertain exception of James III., every one of them was actuated by a noble patriotism, and did his devoir manfully for the improvement and development of his country. They were noble gentlemen one and all; the bigotry, the egotism, the obstinacy of the later Stewarts were not in them. Knights and paladins of an age of romance, they were also stern executors of justice, bold innovators, with eyes ever open to every expedient of progress and prosperity. Their faults were Their faults were those faults of a light heart and genial temperament, which are the most easily understood and pardoned. Under their sway their country and their little capital came to be known over Christendom as not unworthy to hold place among the reigning kingdoms and cities through which the stream of chivalry flowed. They invented the trade, the shipping, the laws and civic order of Scotland. Among her heroes there are none more worthy of everlasting remembrance. They fulfilled their stewardry with a unity of purpose and a steadfastness of aim which, when we take into account the continually recurring lapses of long minorities, is one of the wonders of the time. Edinburgh grew under their sway from an angry village, lying between a fierce castle and a rich monastery, little distinguished among its peers, less favoured than Stirling, less wealthy than the town of St John, to one of the most noted of cities, picturesque and splendid, full of noble houses, the centre of national life and government. And it is curi ous to record that no one of the mon archs who brought it such nobility and fame left any sadness of death to the associations of Edinburgh. They lived and were wedded and filled with the brightness of their happier moments the town which afforded so beautiful a scene for all rejoicings: they died on the field of battle or in other places in conflict or violence or despair. But Edinburgh only retains the brighter memories, the triumphal processions, the bridal finery, the jousts and the feasts, the Parliaments and proclamations of laws and high alliances. The reigns of the Jameses contain the history of her rise, her splendour, her climax of beauty and stateliness, without any association of downfall or decay." This is admirably put; and we may say at once without any qualification, that many of the most moving incidents in Scottish history have never been more brightly The whole of the presented. chapter, for instance, devoted to The desJames I. is excellent. cription of the king's wooing while still an exile in England is just as finely realistic as the picture of Edinburgh on his return :— "Old Edinburgh comes to light in the glow of this arrival, not indeed with any distinctness of vision, but with something of the aspect of a capital filled to overflowing with a many-coloured and picturesque crowd. The country folk in their homespun, and all the smaller rank of gentlemen, with their wives in the French hoods, which fashion already dictated, thronged the ways and filled every window to see the King come in. It was more like the new setting up of a kingdom, and first invention of that dignity, than a mere return; and eager crowds came from every quarter to see the King, so long a mere name, now suddenly blazing into reality, with all the primitive meaning of the word, so much greater and more living than anything that is understood in it now. The King's Grace! after the long sway of the Regent, always darkly feared and suspected, and the feeble deputyship full of abuses of his son Murdoch, it was like a new world to have the true Prince come back, the blood of Bruce, the genuine and native King, not to speak of the fair Princess by his side, and the quickened life they brought with them. From the gates of the castle where they first alighted, down the long ridgethrough the half-grown town within its narrow walls, where a few high houses, first evidences of the growth of the wealthy burgher class, alternated with the low buildings which they were gradually supplanting through the massive masonry of the Port with its battlements and towers to the country greenness and freshness of the Canons' Gate which led to the great convent of the valley, there could be no finer scene for a pageant." There is one omission in Mrs Oliphant's review of the Jameses -one only; we should like to have heard a little more from her of one of the most enigmatical of the Stuarts, the Regent Albany. We have never, for our own part, been able to form any very clear conception of the character of the remarkable man who, after a fashion, governed Scotland for forty years, and of whom Mr Skelton writes : "Albany is one of those peculiar and powerful characters which perplex the historian. He had great opportunities which he misused. Under his government, during a period of profound peace, Scotland was given over to anarchy. The patrimony of the Crown, the estates of the Church, were squandered among nobles who were little better than brigands. On the other hand, he had strong natural affections. He was a devoted father. When he sinned he sinned for his children. He appears besides to have had tastes and occupations which were uncommon in that rude society. He was a man of letters, a man of science. The contemporary annalists are his apologists. The crafty and rapacious tyrant is regarded by Bower and Wynton and Barbour with genuine enthusiasm. Amid the turbulence of Border warfare he is represented as engaged in archæological pursuits, recovering and restoring the relics of an earlier age. A still more striking picture has been preserved by Bower, -sitting on the ramparts of the Castle of Edinburgh, the Regent discourses to his courtiers, during the moonlight night, of the causes of eclipses and the order of the universe." One word of caution, before we leave the Jameses, we would venture to offer to Mrs Oliphant. Lindsay of Pitscottie's garrulous narrative has a perennial charm,— the charm of simplicity, naïveté, and unconscious picturesqueness; but it is not to be taken as gospel truth. It is not a finical criticism only that has found it faulty; it is clear indeed to the most casual student that many of the incidents recorded (as recorded) can be as little historical as Shakespeare's plays. If they have not been evolved out of the writer's inner consciousness, they have been derived, it is obvious, from no higher authority than floating tradition or the gossip of the market-place. We may add that a similar caution should be addressed to those who put their trust in Knox's narrative, Mrs Oliphant, suspect, is rather too much inclined to do. We agree with her that the history of the Reformation in Scotland is surprisingly vivid and intensely dramatic. But it is history written by a man who was one of the chief actors in the drama which it records, and who was as prejudiced, as superstitious, and as unconscientious (where what he called "the Truth" was concerned) as the most bitter and unlettered partisan of the older we as faith could have been. We may trust him so far when he tells us of what took place before his own eyes (though, even then, the incurable bias comes in); but his record of events which he did not witness is comparatively if not absolutely worthless. Up to this time-the close of James V.'s life-we have found ourselves in full accord with Mrs Oliphant.1 When we come to the reign of Mary, we enter "the Debatable land." We are glad to say that Mrs Oliphant's judgment appears to us on the whole to be eminently judicial-alike as regards Mary and as regards Knox. A writer in the 'Spectator' (Dec. 20, 1890) will have it that "she steers a middle course between Mr Skelton and those thoroughgoing worshippers of Knox of of Knox of whom Mr Froude is perhaps the leading representative in modern English literature." It seems to drance and interruption with which the lords must have regarded their companion, with his 'devout imaginations.' When men's lives are subjected to the keen inspection of an ecclesiastical board new to its functions and eager for perfection, which does not disdain the most minute detail nor to listen to the wildest rumours, the high ideal is apt to fall into the most intolerable petty tyranny. Knox had all the limitations of mind natural to his humble origin, and his profession, and the special disadvantage which must attach to the habit of investigating by means of popular accusation and gossip, problematical cases of immorality. With such extraordinary arguments, unconscious it would seem of the absolute incon gruity of his illustrations, obtusely perverse in the dogmatism which destroys both Christian charity and sound perception-though he was as far from obtuse as ever man was by nature-the preacher stood immovable-nay, unassailable. . . . He was dices, violent in speech, often mercia man all faults, bristling with prejuless in judgment, narrow, dogmatic, fiercely intolerant." She It is quite true, of course, that Mrs Oliphant is deeply impressed by what the Reformer-unpleasant and inconvenient as he was in many aspects-contrived to effect, by the dauntless force and independence of his character, for Scotland and for religion. is right so far, no doubt; but we have always thought that there was considerable exaggeration in the view which makes Knox an indispensable factor in Scottish history. We hold, for our own part, that Knox was vitally and fundamentally unreasonable, and that unreasonableness (in other words, departure from, or failure to recognise, the true relations of 1 One or two slips may be noticed for a second edition. Douglas was Warden of the Marches (not of the Marshes), p. 100; Beaton "skulked about his own Fife moors" (p. 204). Should it not be Angus? Opinion is veering, but it is by no means certain that James I. wrote 'Christis Kirk on the Green,' even in a more archaic form than it has come down to us. things) is always punished in the long-run. The Pope of the High Street was not a whit more rational, not a whit more tolerant or enlightened, than the Pope of the Vatican. It may be urged, indeed, that Knox succeeded. Though more than three hundred years, however, have passed since the reformation of religion was carried through, it must not be assumed that we have seen the end. The revolt from Rome was one of those momentous movements which cannot be judged in a day; and we honestly believe that had Erasmus, Maitland, and men of that stamp, been permitted to conduct it—had they not been swept aside by the violence of the torrent greater ultimate stability would have been secured. Rome recovered from the blow with amazing celerity, and the strides that she has been making of late years are ominous, if not of final triumph, yet certainly of a wide supremacy in the not distant future. Would she have retained this marvellous recuperative force had the Reformation been directed upon other lines?- had it been really what it professed to be,the emancipation of the intellect and of the conscience? The truth is, that on the basis of a dogmatism so arbitrary and so narrow as Knox's- a dogmatism even more narrow and arbitrary than that which it succeeded-no enduring structure could be raised, no world-wide authority assured. Knox may or may not have been responsible for the destruction of the abbeys; but he was undoubtedly guilty of a fatal mistake when he cut himself off from historical Christianity, and, in his own It cannot be said, on the other hand, that Mrs Oliphant is uniformly, or even frequently, unfair to the Queen. Mary's charm, her quite innocent charm, is freely recognised, as well as her transcendent ability.1 Yet at the same time there is an under-current of adverse feeling which occasionally comes to the surface in unexpected places. "After the half-dozen years of disaster and tragedy," she remarks for instance, "of which a much greater number of her people believed her the guilty cause than the innocent victim, there were few indeed who maintained their faith." No representation could be further from the mark. There had not been half-a-dozen years of disaster and tragedy. Mary was only six years in Scotland from beginning to end; and the early years were exceptionally peaceful and prosperous. Maitland, for instance, was able to assure the Estates, four years after her coming, that both at home and abroad the nation continued in the enjoyment of almost unexampled repose 'peace with all foreign nations, and quietness among ourselves in such sort that it might be truly affirmed that in living memory Scotland had never been in greater tranquillity." We should like to know, besides, what authority there is for holding that even after Darnley's death the attitude of the nation, as a whole, was bitterly hostile to the Queen. "There would seem to be no doubt of the strong immediate feeling which arose against the Queen, the instant conclusion of the bystanders as to her guilt. The whole 1 Mrs Oliphant, however, is rather inclined to accept Mr Swinburne's wellknown paradox. But the conclusion that Mary could not be innocent unless she was a weak and brainless idiot seems somewhat strained. |