Her daughter Mary gave Edinburgh the most exciting, romantic, interesting, and important time in the city’s annals. It was scarcely six years in all (19th August 1561-16th June 1567), but those were crowded years: the comparatively gay time at first; the marriage with Darnley; the assassination of Rizzio; the murder of Darnley; her seizure by Bothwell; her marriage to Bothwell; the surrender of Carberry, with her departure for Loch Leven. I scarce know what to select. On 15th April 1562 Randolph writes: “The Queen readeth daily after her dinner, instructed by a learned man, Mr. George Buchanan, somewhat of Livy.” You wish it had been Virgil, because you are sure scholar and pupil had tried the _Sortes Virgilianæ_ with results even more pregnant than happed to Mary’s grandson Charles I., at Oxford, in the time of the civil wars, and the mere mention of George Buchanan is fateful. He, at any rate, was an earnest and high-minded man, and he employed all the grace of his Latin muse to say delightful things about her on more than one occasion, and he had, in after years, every term of invective to hurl at her also in Latin, but prose this time, and he felt himself justified in both. The modern point of view which would find her almost certainly guilty of being an accessary before the fact to the slaughter of Darnley, that would also find that the circumstances were so peculiar, that she was by no means altogether blameworthy, was not the conception of her own day. She was guilty, and therefore a monster of wickedness; or she was innocent, and therefore a martyr: those are the sharply opposed views. It was not an age of compromise or judicial balance. Take another incident. Rizzio’s murder was on 9th March 1566. Immediately after she won over Darnley, mixed up with the affair as he had been. The pair escaped from Holyrood in the midnight hours, through the burial vaults and tombs of the palace. Darnley made some sudden and half-involuntary reference to the freshly-turned grave of Rizzio that lay right in their path. Mary gripped his arm and vowed, in what must have been a terrible whisper, that ere a year had passed “a fatter than he should lie as low.” Kirk-o’-field was on 10th February 1567.