Having ended that reading wholly, he turned to the spot where he thought the queen must be, and cried in a loud voice: “Adieu, most beautiful, most cruel princess in all the world!” then, firmly stretching his neck to the executioner, he let himself be killed very easily. Some have wished to discuss why it was that he called her cruel; whether because she had no pity on his love, or on his life. But what should she have done? If, after her first pardon she had granted him a second, she would on all sides have been slandered; to save her honour it was needful that the law should take its course. That is the end of this history. [Illustration: MARIA STVART SCO: ET GAL: REGINA] “Well, they may say what they will, many a true heart will be sad for Mary Stuart, e’en if all be true men say of her.” That speech, which Walter Scott puts into the mouth of one of the personages in his novel of “The Abbot” at the moment when he is preparing the reader for an introduction to the beautiful queen, remains the last word of posterity as it was of contemporaries,--the conclusion of history as of poesy. Elizabeth living triumphed, and her policy after her lives and triumphs still, so that Protestantism and the British empire are one and the same thing. Marie Stuart succumbed, in her person and in that of her descendants; Charles I. under the axe, James II. in exile, each continued and added to his heritage of faults, imprudences, and calamities; the whole race of the Stuarts was cut off, and seems to have deserved it. But, vanquished in the order of things and under the empire of fact, and even under that of inexorable reason, the beautiful queen has regained all in the world of imagination and of pity. She has found, from century to century, knights, lovers, and avengers. A few years ago, a Russian of distinction, Prince Alexander Labanoff, began, with incomparable zeal, a search through the archives, the collections, the libraries of Europe, for documents emanating directly from Marie Stuart, the most insignificant as well as the most important of her letters, in order to connect them and so make a nucleus of history, and also an authentic shrine, not doubting that interest, serious and tender interest, would rise, more powerful still, from the bosom of truth itself. On the appearance of this collection of Prince Labanoff, M. Mignet produced, from 1847 to 1850, a series of articles in the “Journal des Savants,” in which, not content with appreciating the prince’s documents, he presented from himself new documents, hitherto unpublished and affording new lights. Since then, leaving the form of criticism and dissertation, M. Mignard has taken this fine subject as a whole, and has written a complete narrative upon it, grave, compact, interesting, and definitive, which he is now publishing [1851].