fanatical enthusiasm, the semi-barbarous prejudices of the times, without finding her own virtues immerged in the crowd of contending interests, and the vortex of fierce passions that surrounded her. Mary's failings, almost without an exception, "leant to virtue's side." They arose partly from too enthusiastic a temperament, and partly from a want of experience. Although she lived forty-four years and two months, it ought to be remembered that she was just twenty-five when she came into England, and that all the most important events of her history happened between sixteen and twenty-five. With feelings whose strength kept pace with the unsuspicious generosity of her nature, Mary was one who, in an especial manner, stood in need of experience, to teach what the world calls wisdom. The great mass of mankind, endowed with no finer susceptibilities, and influenced by no hidden impulses of soul or sense, fall into the common track naturally and easily. But they whom heaven has either cursed or blessed with minds, over which external circumstances exercise a deeper sway, whose fancies are more vivid, and whose impressions are more acute, require the aid of time to clip the wings of imagination,--to cast a soberer shade over the glowing pictures of hope,--and to teach the art of reducing an ideal standard of felicity and virtue, to one less romantic, but more practical. Had she continued longer in public life, there is every probability that the world would have been forced to own, without a dissenting voice, the talent which Mary possessed. In youth, genius is often indicated only by eccentricity and imprudence; but its errors are errors of judgment, which have their origin in an exuberance of sensibility. The sentiments of the heart have burst forth into precocious blossom long before the reasoning faculties have reached maturity. Her youth was Mary's chief misfortune, or rather it was the source from which most of her misfortunes sprung. She judged of mankind not as they were, but as she wished them to be. Conscious of the sincerity of her own character, and the affectionate nature of her own dispositions, she formed attachments too rashly, and trusted too indiscriminately. She often found, when it was too late, that she had been deceived; and the consequence was, that she became diffident of her own judgment, and anxious to be guided by that of others. Here again, however, she fell into an opposite extreme. In yielding, on her return to Scotland, so implicitly to the counsels of Murray, she did what few queens, young and flattered as she had been, would have done, and what, had she been older, or more experienced, she ought not to have done.