Much has been said of the bearing of Knox towards Queen Mary, and said, as we believe, most unjustly, for though he felt himself constrained to oppose her course, and would not yield to her wishes, yet he was never rude, or irreverent, or ungentlemanly. As Carlyle says, "he was never in the least ill-tempered with her Majesty;" and most of those who accuse him in this matter, we shrewdly suspect, have never read the accounts of his interviews with her, but have simply accepted the common babblement which has been so long current regarding them. No candid student of the rehearsal of these interviews in Knox's History, we are sure, could refuse to endorse the accuracy of Carlyle's statement of the case when he says "Mary often enough bursts into tears, oftener than once into passionate long continued fits of weeping, Knox standing with mild and pitying visage, but without the least hair's-breadth of recanting or recoiling, waiting till the fit pass, and then with all softness but with all inexorability taking up his theme again." But while Knox's manner toward her Majesty has been most microscopically examined, very little attention has been given to Mary's manner toward Knox; and on this particular occasion, in the presence of the council and the nobles, sitting too as a kind of court before which he was on trial for high treason, it was flippant and unmannerly in the extreme, and was besides entirely {176} incompatible with the presence in her of a judicial spirit. When she entered the chamber and took her seat, she first smiled, and then burst into a loud guffaw, saying, "This is a good beginning, but wot you whereat I laugh? That man made me weep, and shed never a tear himself. I will see now if I can make him weep." Then after his letter had been read, and he was defending himself, she cried, "What is this? Methinks you trifle with him. Who gave him authority to make convocation of my lieges? Is not that treason?" There spake the despot, for beneath the velvet of her glove there was always a hand of iron; but she touched a chord that vibrated to a note which she had not thought to sound when she used these words, for Ruthven said boldly and categorically, "No, madame!" The gruff nobleman was immediately commanded by her Majesty to "hold his peace," and Knox went on with his defence in such a way that he successfully vindicated his right to call and hold a meeting of his friends for any lawful purpose when and where he chose. He was next questioned about the statement in his letter to the effect that he feared the prosecution of these men would open a door for the infliction of cruelty upon a greater number; and as he was proceeding to enlarge upon the deeds of the papists in France, and denouncing those who had done them, he was interrupted by the ejaculation of one of the nobles, "You forget yourself; you are not in the pulpit." This called forth the often quoted words, "I am in the place where I am