Considering the very opposite opinions which have been long entertained, regarding the character and conduct of the Queen of Scots, no memoirs of her life would be complete, that did not contain some examination of the evidence upon which they who believe her guilty principally rest their conviction. This evidence consists of eight Letters, eleven Love-Sonnets, and one Marriage Contract, all alleged to have been written in the Queen's own hand, and addressed to the Earl of Bothwell. In corroboration of these, another Contract, said to have been written by the Earl of Huntly, and signed by the Queen; and the Confessions and Depositions of some of the persons who were known to be implicated in Bothwell's guilt, were likewise produced. Of the Letters, two were supposed to have been written from Glasgow, at the time Mary went thither to visit Darnley when he was ill, and are intended to prove her criminal connection with Bothwell; two or three from the Kirk-of-Field, for the purpose of facilitating the arrangements regarding the murder; and the rest after that event, and before her abduction, to show that the whole scheme of the pretended ravishment was preconcerted between them. The precise time at which it is pretended the Sonnets were composed, does not appear; but expressions in them prove, that it must have been posterior to the Queen's residence at Dunbar. The Contract of Marriage, in Mary's own hand, though without date, must have been written very soon after Darnley's death, and contained a promise never to marry any one but Bothwell. The Contract, said to be in Huntly's hand, was dated at Seton, the 5th of April 1567, eight weeks after Darnley's death, a week before Bothwell's trial and acquittal, and three weeks before he was divorced from his first wife. The Confessions and Depositions are various, but only in one or two of them is any allusion made to Mary. The Letters, Sonnets, and Contracts, were said to have been discovered in a small gilt coffer, which the Earl of Bothwell left in the Castle of Edinburgh, in the custody of Sir James Balfour, at the time he fled from Edinburgh to Borthwick, about a month after his marriage, and shortly before the affair at Carberry Hill. After his discomfiture there, he is stated to have sent his servant, Dalgleish, into Edinburgh from Dunbar, to demand the coffer from Balfour. Sir James, it was said, delivered it up, but at the same time gave intimation to the Earl of Morton, who seized Dalgleish, and made himself master of the box and its contents. The Letters and Sonnets, which were written in French, were afterwards all translated into Scotch, and three into Latin.