are those which the least interest his fellow-men, and during the time which elapsed between Gowrie's departure from Paris and his arrival in Scotland, no adventures or impediments occurred which can justify much detail. That departure was delayed for a day or two beyond the period which he had at first fixed; and though the weather was now becoming sharp and cold, yet those few days produced a favourable change, and rain and fog gave way to clear skies and broad sunshine. The days, however, were brief, and the journeys necessarily short; so that a week elapsed between his departure from Paris and his arrival at Calais. Four days more brought him to Loudon, and now a new scene opened upon him. Furnished with letters from Sir Henry Neville to the principal statesmen of the court of Queen Elizabeth, he was received with every demonstration of respect and esteem in the English capital, and two days after was presented to the queen herself. I find little record in history of what followed; but one historian, whose views, it must be remarked, were strongly biassed by peculiar feelings of partizanship, declares that the honours shown by the English sovereign to the young earl were of the most marked and extraordinary kind. It is sometimes, in the present day, not easy to account for the course of policy pursued by Elizabeth in her conduct to the subjects of the neighbouring crown; but we must not doubt well-authenticated facts because we cannot penetrate their motives. The writer whom I have mentioned states, in speaking of the Earl of Gowrie, that the queen "ordered that guards should attend him, that all honours should be paid him which were due to a Prince of Wales and to her first cousin, and that he should be entertained at the public expense all the time he should remain at her court."