Scotland, since Marie Stuart left it as a child, had undergone great changes; the principal was the Reformed religion which had taken root there and extended itself vigorously. The great reformer Knox preached the new doctrine, which found in Scotland stern, energetic souls ready made to receive it. The old struggle of the lords and barons against the kings was complicated and redoubled now by that of cities and people against the brilliant beliefs of the Court and the Catholic hierarchy. The birth of modern society, of civil equality, of respect for the rights of all was painfully working itself out through barbaric scenes, and by means of fanaticism itself. Alone and without counsel, contending with the lords and the nobility as her ancestors had done, Marie Stuart, quick, impulsive, subject to predilections and to antipathies, was already insufficient for the work; what therefore could it be when she found herself face to face with a religious party, born and growing during recent years, face to face with an argumentative, gloomy party, moral and daring, discussing rationally, Bible in hand, the right of kings, and pushing logic even into prayer? Coming from a literary and artificial Court, there was nothing in her that could comprehend these grand and voiceless movements of the people, either to retard them or turn them to her own profit by adapting herself to them. “She returned,” says M. Mignet, “full of regrets and disgust, to the barren mountains and the uncultured inhabitants of Scotland. More lovable than able, very ardent and in no way cautious, she returned with a grace that was out of keeping with her surroundings, a dangerous beauty, a keen but variable intellect, a generous but rash soul, a taste for the arts, a love of adventure, and all the passions of a woman joined to the excessive liberty of a widow.” And to complicate the peril of this precarious situation she had for neighbour in England a rival queen, Elizabeth, whom she had first offended by claiming her title, and next, and no less, by a feminine and proclaimed superiority of beauty and grace,--a rival queen capable, energetic, rigid, and dissimulating, representing the contrary religious opinion, and surrounded by able counsellors, firm, consistent, and committed to the same cause. The seven years that Marie Stuart spent in Scotland after her return from France (August 19, 1561) to her imprisonment (May 18, 1568) are filled with all the blunders and all the faults that could be committed by a young and thoughtless princess, impulsive, unreflecting, and without shrewdness or ability except in the line of her passion, never in view of a general political purpose. The policy of Mme. de Longueville, during the Fronde, seems to me of the same character.