"Si je suis en repos, Sommeillant sur ma couche, J'oy qu'il me tient propos, Je le sens qui me touche; En labeur ou requoy Toujours est près de moi. XV "Je ne voy autre object Pour beau qu'il se présente; A qui que soit subject Oncques mon coeur consente, Exempt de perfection A ceste affection. XVI "Mets, chanson, icy frain A si triste complainte, Dont sera le refrain: 'Amour vraye et non faincte Pour séparation N'a diminution'." XVII Tel estoit le doux chant De Dame souveraine, Qui, mon coeur arrachant D'une fuite soudaine, Me donna en ce lieu Coup mortel d'un Adieu. We recall that the stanzas which we have numbered I and II constitute the Song which, according to Brantôme, was composed "at Court"; and that those from VI to XVI, inclusively, are, with an alteration of the first line, and some slight variations elsewhere, what he called the Song of Mary Stuart herself. The title, the three connecting stanzas III-V, and also the last, XVII, were discovered in the Périgueux manuscript FOOTNOTES: for THE SONG OF MARY STUART [106] T. v, pp. 84, 85, 88-90, 123. [107] Périgueux, Cassard frères. [108] _Ibid._ MAISTER RANDOLPHE'S FANTASIE A Suppressed Satire About the middle of May, 1566, Robert Melvill was dispatched by Mary, Queen of Scots, as a special envoy to the English Court. The ostensible purpose of his mission was to request Queen Elizabeth to stand godmother to the royal infant whose birth was shortly expected.[109] And it was, indeed, with this object that his journey had, in the first instance, been resolved upon. But, three or four days before the time originally fixed for his departure,[110] he had been hastily summoned to Holyrood and ordered to set out at once, and with all speed, on an errand of a very different kind. According to the tenor of his later instructions, he was the bearer not of a friendly message from Mary Stuart to her loving cousin, but of a bitter complaint from the Queen of Scotland to the English sovereign. Mary had been informed by one of her agents at Berwick that "there was a booke wrytten agaynst her, of her lyf and govermente".[111] Though possessing no actual knowledge of the contents of the obnoxious libel and acquainted with its general tone and purport only, she had "taken it so grevouslye as noth[=y]ge of longe time had come so near her hearte".[112] Not only did she resent the insult as a sovereign, but she also felt the outrage as a woman, and expressed her fear lest, having come to her so suddenly and at so critical a time, the unwelcome intelligence "sholde breed daynger to her byrthe or hurte to her selfe".[113] And Melvill had been hurried off to London to inform Elizabeth of the crime committed by one of her subjects, "that in tyme this worke mighte be suppressed and",[114] more important still,