dancing were unrivalled; and to gratify Mary, he avowed, whether real or affected, a great fondness for poetry and music. Melville says quaintly, "He was of a heigh stature, lang and small, even and brent up; well instructed from his youth in all honest and comely exercises."[83] It was not, however, Darnley's exterior in which Mary and her subjects were principally interested. The bent which nature and education had given to his mind and character, was a much more important subject of consideration. With regard to his religious sentiments, they seem to have sat loosely upon him; though his mother was a Catholic, he himself professed adherence to the Established Church of England.[84] In Scotland, he saw the necessity of ingratiating himself with the Reformers; and he went, the very first Sunday he spent in Edinburgh, to hear Knox preach. But Darnley's great misfortune was, that, before he had learned any thing in the school of experience, and in the very heat and fire of youth, he was raised to an eminence which, so far from enabling him to see over the heads of other men, only rendered him giddy, and made his inferiority the more apparent. He was naturally of a headstrong and violent temper, which might, perhaps, have been tamed down by adversity, but which only ran into wilder waste in the sunshine of prosperity. He was passionately fond of power, without the ability to make a proper use of it. It is not unlikely that, had he continued a subject for some years longer, and associated with men of sound judgment and practical knowledge, he might have divested himself of some of the follies of youth, and acquired a contempt for many of its vices. But his honours came upon him too suddenly; and the intellectual strength of his character, never very great, was crushed under the load. Conscious of his inability to cope with persons of talent, he sought to gather round him those who were willing to flatter him on account of his rank, or to join him in all kinds of dissipation, with the view of sharing his ill-regulated liberality. Of the duties of a courtier, he knew something; but of those of a politician, he was profoundly ignorant. The polish of his manners gained him friends at first; but the reckless freedom with which he gave utterance to his hasty opinions and ill-grounded prejudices, speedily converted them into enemies. He had only been a short time in Scotland, when he remarked to one of the Earl of Murray's brothers, who pointed out to him on the map the Earl's lands, "that they were too extensive." Murray was told of this; and, perceiving what he had to expect when Darnley became King, he took his measures accordingly. Mary, whose affliction it was to have husbands far inferior to herself in mental qualifications, beseeched Darnley to be more guarded in future. That he was somewhat violent and self-sufficient, she did not feel to be an insuperable objection, considering, as she did, the