vile woman, a shameless deceiver; every bad name that can be coined by a mediaeval fancy, not unlearned in such violences; but when he is face to face with this woman of sin it is not in Knox to give other than a true picture, and that--apart from the grudging acknowledgment of her qualities and indication of evil intentions divined--is almost always an attractive one. He, too, shows far from badly in the encounter. In this case, as in so many others, the simple record denuded of all gloss gives at once a much better and we do not doubt much more true representation of the two remarkable persons involved, than when loaded with explanations, either from other people or from themselves. It cannot be said that Knox is just to Mary in the opinions he expresses of her, as he is in the involuntary picture which his inalienable truthfulness to fact forces from him. It must be remembered, however, that his history was written after the disastrous story had advanced nearly to its end, and when the stamp of crime (as Knox and so many more believed) had thrown a sinister shade upon all her previous life. Looking back upon the preliminaries which led to such wild confusion and misery, it was not unnatural that a man so absolute in judgment should perceive in the most innocent bygone details indications of depravity. It is one (whether good or bad we will not say) consequence of the use and practice of what may, to use a modern word, be called society, that men are less disposed to believe in the existence of monstrous and hideous evil, that they do not attach an undue importance to trifles nor take levity for vice. Knox had all the limitations of mind natural to his humble origin, and his profession, and the special disadvantage which must attach to the habit of investigating by means of popular accusation and gossip, problematical cases of immorality. He was able to believe that the Queen, when retired into her private apartments with her ladies, indulged in "skipping not very comelie for honest women," and that all kinds of brutal orgies went on at court--incidents certainly unnecessary to prove her after-guilt, and entirely out of keeping with all the surrounding associations, as if Holyrood had been a changehouse in "Christ Kirk on the green." It did not offend his sense of the probable or likely that such insinuations should be made, and he recorded them accordingly not as insinuations but as facts, in a manner only possible to that conjoint force of ignorance and scorn which continually makes people of one class misconceive and condemn those of another. Dancing was in those days the most decorous of performances: but if Mary had been proved to have danced a stately _pas seul_ in a minuet, it was to Knox, who knew no better, as if she had indulged in the wildest bobbing of a country fair--nay, he would probably have thought the high-skipping rural performer by far the more innocent of the two.