of a long hand, elegant and slender (_gracilis_), an alabaster forehead dazzling beneath the crape, and with golden hair--which needs a brief remark. It is a poet (Ronsard) who speaks of “the gold of her ringed and braided hair,” and poets, as we know, employ their words a little vaguely. Mme. Sand, speaking of a portrait she had seen as a child in the English Convent, says, without hesitation, “Marie was beautiful, but red-haired.” M. Dargaud speaks of another portrait, “in which a sunray lightens” he says rather oddly, “the curls of her living and electric hair.” But Walter Scott, reputed the most correct of historical romance-writers, in describing Marie Stuart a prisoner in Lochleven Castle, shows us, as though he had seen them, her thick tresses of “dark brown,” which escaped now and then from her coif. Here we are far from the red or golden tints, and I see no other way of conciliating these differences than to rest on “that hair so beautiful, so blond and fair” [_si blonds et cendrés_] which Brantôme, an ocular witness, admired,--hair that captivity whitened, leaving the poor queen of forty-six “quite bald” in the hands of her executioner, as l’Estoile relates. But at nineteen, the moment of her departure from France, the young widow was in all the glory of her beauty, except for a brilliancy of colour, which she lost at the death of her first husband, giving place to a purer whiteness. Withal a lively, graceful, and sportive mind, and French raillery, an ardent soul, capable of passion, open to desire, a heart which knew not how to draw back when flame or fancy or enchantment stirred it. Such was the queen, adventurous and poetical, who tore herself from France in tears, sent by politic uncles to recover her authority amid the roughest and most savage of “Frondes.”