I cannot do justice to the subject without adverting here to the influence of the popular histories of those transactions written by two distinguished individuals of our own country. The political prejudices and sceptical opinions of Mr Hume are well known, and appear prominently in every part of his History of England. Regarding the various systems of religious belief and worship as distinguished from one another merely by different shades of falsehood and superstition, he has been led, by a strange but not inexplicable bias, almost uniformly to show the most marked partiality to the grosser and more corrupt forms of religion; has spoken with greater contempt of the protestants than of the Roman catholics, and treated the Scottish with greater severity than the English reformers. Forgetting what was due to the character of a philosopher, which he was so ambitious {248} to maintain in his other writings, he has acted as the partisan and advocate of a particular family; and, in vindicating some of the worst measures of the Stuarts, has done signal injustice to the memory of the most illustrious patriots of both kingdoms. Though convinced that the queen of Scotland was guilty of the crimes laid to her charge, he has laboured to screen her from the infamy to which a fair and unvarnished statement of facts must have exposed her character, by fixing the attention of his readers on an untrue and exaggerated representation of the rudeness of Knox and the other reformers by whom she was surrounded, and by absurdly imputing to their treatment of her the faults into which she was betrayed. No person who is acquainted with the writings of Dr Robertson will accuse him of being actuated by such improper motives. But the warmest admirers of his History of Scotland cannot deny, that he has been misled by the temptation of making Mary the heroine of his story, and of thus interesting his readers deeply in his narrative, by blending the tender and romantic with the more dry and uninteresting detail of public transactions. By a studious exhibition of the personal charms and accomplishments of the queen, by representing her faults as arising from the unfortunate circumstances in which she was placed, by touching gently on the errors of her conduct, while he dwells on the cruelty and the dissimulation of her rival, and by describing her sufferings as exceeding the tragical distresses which fancy has feigned to excite sorrow and commiseration, {249} he throws a veil over those vices which he could not deny; while the sympathy which his pathetic account of her death naturally awakens in the minds of his readers, effaces the impressions of her guilt which his preceding narrative had produced. However amiable the feelings of the author might be, the tendency of such a representation is evident. The Dissertation on the murder of king Henry has, no doubt, convinced many of Mary’s accession to the perpetration of that deed; but the History of Scotland has