The manner in which this act of terrible retribution was executed is too well known to the student of history to require repetition. Suffice it to say that, by a _coup-de-main_, sixteen armed men made themselves masters of the castle of St Andrews, overpowered and dispersed the retainers of the cardinal, and quenched the existence of that haughty prelate in his blood. William Kirkaldy was not the slayer, but, as an accomplice, he must bear whatever load of odium is cast upon the perpetrators of the deed. We cannot help thinking that our author exhibits an unnecessary degree of horror in this instance. Far be it from us to palliate bloodshed, in any age or under any provocation: neither do we agree with John Knox, that the extermination of Beatoun was a "godly fact." But we doubt whether it can be called a murder. In the first place, old Kirkaldy knew, on the authority of James V., that a list of three hundred and sixty names, including his own and those of his most immediate friends, had been made out by the cardinal, as a catalogue of victims who were to be burned for heresy. This contemplated atrocity, far worse than the massacre of St Bartholomew, might not, indeed, have been carried into effect, even on account of its magnitude; but the mere knowledge that it had been planned, was enough to justify the Kirkaldys, and those marked out for impeachment, in considering Beatoun as their mortal foe. That the cardinal never departed from his bloody design, is apparent from the fact, that, after his death, a paper was found in his repositories, ordaining that "Norman Leslie, sheriff of Fife, John Leslie, father's brother to Norman, the Lairds of Grange, _elder and younger_, Sir James Learmonth of Dairsie, and the Laird of Raith, should either have been slain or else taken." The law at that period could afford no security against such a design, so that Beatoun's assassination may have been an act of necessary self-defence, which it would be extremely difficult to blame. As to the sacrilege, we cannot regard that as an aggravation. If a prelate of the Roman Church, like Beatoun, chose to make himself notorious to the world by the number and scandal of his profligacies; if, with a carnality and disregard of appearances not often exhibited by laymen, he turned his palace into a seraglio; and if his mistress was actually surprised, at the time of the attack, in the act of escaping from his bedchamber,--great allowance must be made for the obtuseness of the men who could not understand the relevancy of the plea of priesthood which he offered, in order that his holy calling might shield him from secular consequences. But further, is the fate of Wishart to go for nothing? Setting the natural influences of bigotry aside, and with every consideration for the zeal which could hurry even so good a man as Sir Thomas More to express, in words at least, a desire to see the faggot and the stake in full operation--what shall we say to the individual who