that it would never have taken the firm hold, that it has done, of his faith as a man. To the teaching of religion in a school thus dogmatically it is necessary that the teacher be a religious man. It is for this reason that the teachers of Church schools are religiously educated in Church training schools. These schools are all religious foundations-religion is at the basis of their instruction and discipline-and they are denominational schools; and nothing can bear a more certain testimony to the importance of this fact than the character which for a period of more than twenty years the teachers trained in these schools have, as a class, maintained. The trained teacher is as a rule a man of a strict life and a religious character, and as the children of a school take in a remarkable way the impression of the teacher in contact with whose mind their minds are placed for, so many hours weekly, some religious influences cannot but pass from him to them-as, if he were an irreligious man, irreligious influences would. But what will the training Schools for secular school teachers be? What element is to come, in their system, in the place of the religious element in ours? The following are the opinions about religion which Mr. Dawson, a secularist and great supporter of the League, allowed himself to give expression to at its first meeting:

'I am a latitudinarian avowedly. Why should I pay to have done on the week days what I spend all my Sundays endeavouring to undo? Is it not time that the little children should not be plagued with the reverse of what the scholarship of England and the right learning of the Church have shown to be the only things that a scholar can hold? If gentlemen present can show you that Moses did not write the whole of the Pentateuch, am I to be compelled to pay for telling children that he did? Is it not time that children should not build up what it will be their first duty when they are older to pull down? Have not some of us gone through that bitter and painful process of taking our fathers' creed slowly down? And do we not know what it costs? Is it pleasant for a man to have to forsake the creed of his youth? Is the process so agreeable that it is right to subject the children of this country to it?'

It is clear that teachers trained in religious training colleges cannot be qualified to conduct schools on the type of the League. A Latitudinarian Training College must be established for the express purpose. But a trained latitudinarian teacher, whether a schoolmaster or a schoolmistress, will jar harshly on the life of a village. That life is in its social bearings and its characteristic features a religious life. The Church stands in the centre of the village, representing by its size, its antiquity, and the solidity of its structure, as compared with the cottages of the village, the contrast of that which is permanent with that which is passing

away

away. Not far from it, in the village street, stands the Dissenting-chapel, and perhaps two or three more in the lanes leading to it, or in neighbouring hamlets; these are indications of the religious life of the village intelligible to every one. If you inquire who the chief men of the village are, the men whose probity is above suspicion, whose judgment has weight in the village, who by honest industry have become men of substance, and who most promote the public good, you will find them commonly to be men much occupied in the interests of religion -regular Churchmen, or class-leaders or regular attendants of the several Dissenting communities. Round these religious centres all the village charities congregate-the offertory, the clothing-club, the sick-club, the coal-club, the shoe-club, the village library and institute, the village temperance societies, and the schools. Politics do not easily find their way into villages. The daily incidents of village-life, the religious topics of the day, and the markets, are subjects enough for rural thought. The good order of the village rests chiefly on a religious basis. It is founded in the public opinion of the village, and that is founded, as far as morals are concerned, in religion, for the leaders of it are religious men. If the people of the village are for the most part honest in their dealings, and if their word is to be relied upon; if they are courteous and civil to one another (and courtesy and civility are certainly on the increase in village-life); if the farmer, the village blacksmith, and carpenter, and shopkeeper, and tailor, and shoemaker are law-abiding men, and show, when occasion arises, that they have some of the feelings of gentlemen: it is the religious character of the village that is at the bottom of it. It is that which chiefly governs the village, and not the State. The State has but little voice in the matter. Little indeed is known of the State except through the tax-gatherer. The policeman keeps some two or three houses only in the village under his eye. Who shall tell from what crimes even the scapegraces of the village who hang about the publichouse-door have been kept back by the Bible lessons of the village school? The consciousness of divine things is never perhaps wholly absent or inoperative in men who have once come to the knowledge of them, and even the worst in the village would be yet worse if its religious life were destroyed, and the fear of God utterly taken away and banished from it. The descent of a trained latitudinarian schoolmaster on a scene like this would be simply a public calamity. Being but a half-educated man, he would represent the extreme opinions of the latitudinarian school in which he had been trained. Being a schoolmaster, his opinions

could

could not but break out in his teaching and be shared by the pupil-teachers under him, and, as far as they could understand them, by his scholars. Being a supercilious man, of necessity, in his capacity of a half-educated man and a latitudinarian schoolmaster, he could scarcely fail to become the oracle of the village, and as such to do a great deal to sap its religious life and the foundations of its social and moral well-being. When such men shall have been sent to all our country villages, it will probably be found that a great deal will have to be done by the State to preserve public order that is now done without it.

Art. VII.-History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada. By James Anthony Froude, M.A., late Fellow of Exeter College. Vols. IX. X. XI. XII. London, 1869.

2. Histoire de Marie Stuart. Par Jules Gauthier. Paris, 1869. 3. Mary Queen of Scots and her Accusers. By John Hosack, Barrister-at-Law. Edinburgh, 1869.

10 those who have made the reign of Queen Elizabeth their study, the year that has just passed away will always be one of importance. The most interesting of all our reigns, and perhaps the most influential on our subsequent history, has just been treated by three writers who will probably leave a mark either in this country or on the Continent, or on both. Two of them indeed profess only to deal with the romantic story of the Queen of Scots, but her history is the key to that of her great rival; and the four volumes of Mr. Froude, which we are now to notice, span that history from the murder of Darnley, with which they commence, to the execution of the alleged murderer, with which they end. Mr. Hosack's and M. Gauthier's books seem to have been suggested by Mr. Froude's volumes as they have during the last few years issued from the press; and now, along with the last instalment of the work, we have, very opportunely, the other side of the question. Mr. Froude's is the most bitter, the most vehement, and at the same time the most circumstantial attack ever made on the memory of Mary Stuart. Mr. Hosack's is certainly the most ingenious, if not the most able defence ever yet set up. M. Gauthier's is one of those neat and fluent narratives for which our neighbours are famous, taking one view alone of the question, as if there could be no other, yet with a full knowledge of that other, and supplied with the latest authorities, very largely quoted, for the support of his work.

That

That we are not exaggerating the place taken by Mary Stuart's career in enabling us to form an estimate of Elizabeth's reign, and of its treatment by an author, is affirmed by Mr. Froude himself, who truly tells us, that—

the revolution through which Scotland and England were passing was visibly modified by it (the murder of Darnley); it perplexed the counsels and complicated the policy of the great Catholic Powers of the Continent; while the ultimate verdict of history on the character of the greatest English statesmen of the age must depend upon the opinion which the eventual consent of mankind shall accept on the share of the Queen of Scots herself in that transaction.' (ix. 2.)

We are further invited to test Mr. Froude on this cardinal point by the fact that his so-called 'History of England' during this reign is far more a biography of the two Queens than a history of the country; and that he not only omits the last important fifteen years of the reign of Elizabeth in order apparently to bring the deaths of the Queens into the same concluding volume with dramatic effect (it must be either on this ground, or because he was tired of the subject, since the reason he gives for ending where he does is scarcely intelligible), but regards every other question of the period through glasses stained with the colour which he has put upon this particular set of transactions. Not that we mean to insinuate that Mr. Froude has consciously taken up his view of Mary's guilt and hypocrisy with the express purpose of using it as a lever for breaking down any received opinions. We hope, indeed, to show that his treatment of the period has diverged from the true course in consequence of certain hallucinations, but his position as to Mary was necessary for that treatment, and it is evident to us that in the pursuit of his object he has rushed blindfold into more than one trap.

Mr. Froude's mastery of a brilliant style is so generally admitted that we need spend no time in praising it, though we cannot honestly say that we think he has escaped the literary dangers which beset sensational and imaginative writers. But such seductions only make it the more necessary that we should rub our eyes, and try to look straight on. It is a great thing indeed to have, in the modern phrase, a 'readable' book; but it is not all. It is very pleasant to be carried swiftly and easily along; but are we going the right way? We are not presumptuous enough to suppose that we ourselves possess a perfect clue through the most perplexed labyrinth of modern history, but we may at least indicate some grounds for questioning whether even the most positive and eloquent of our professed guides has possession of it.

So large a literature has sprung up round the story of Mary Stuart

Stuart that until quite lately it has been popularly supposed that the subject had been thoroughly worked out. Experts of course knew better; but these books will in all probability again range the readers of this generation, and especially the younger ones, on either side of two conflicting ranks; for once more we have the wonderful, and still most mysterious story put forth by consummate partisans who seize every point which can make for their own side, and neglect, or are unable to see, the points which make for the other; and still we are nearly as far as ever from the cool and impartial estimate which the course of a long controversy does in the end bring to the front. It is now many years since Hallam,* in despair, summed up the dispute with the wise and pregnant remark that it may be given as the result of fair inquiry that to impeach the character of most of Mary's adversaries would be a far easier task than to exonerate her own.' But he would now, we venture to think, scarcely give the judg ment he then pronounced upon the famous Casket Letters, on which so much did really, and on which so much more has been supposed to turn. On these Casket Letters, generally considered the central point of the question, we propose to say a few words; but it will be convenient to notice previously the career of Mary before the murder of Darnley, as given us on either side by the present writers, apologizing to those of our readers who are already sufficiently familiar with the subject to require no such preliminary sketch.

The divergence begins very early. On one side we have the picture of an extraordinarily clever and beautiful child, educated up to mature womanhood at the most corrupt and brilliant court of Europe, yet preserved from all taint by, of all people in the world, Catherine de Medicis! So says M. Gauthier. On the other side, writers like Mignet have traced the subsequent crimes and follies of the Queen of Scots to the horrible atmosphere which she had breathed in France. We have little hesitation in this matter. It is indeed no slight point in her favour that, in such a court, no scandal had tainted her character till she came to Scotland; but it is hard to disconnect that training of thirteen years with such incidents as the tragical story of Chatelard, the contempt of appearances-to say the least, which she showed in the case of Rizzio, and the shocking marriage with Bothwell.

In the first of these cases we hold Mr. Froude to be right in attaching great blame to the beautiful woman who could play with the passions of an over-wrought, crack-brained gentleman, and then have him executed when he concealed himself in her room.

*Constitutional History,' iii. 315.

† i. 26.