Such conduct, and such deeds, crowned by her heedless flight into England and the imprudent abandonment of her person to Elizabeth, seem little calculated to make the touching and pathetic heroine we are accustomed to admire and cherish in Marie Stuart. Yet she deserves all pity; and we have but to follow her through the third and last portion of her life, through that long, unjust, and sorrowful captivity of nineteen years (May 18, 1568, to February 5, 1587) to render it unconsciously. Struggling without defence against a crafty and ambitious rival, liable to mistakes from friends outside, the victim of a grasping and tenacious policy which never let go its prey and took so long a time to torture before devouring it, she never for a single instant fails towards herself; she rises ever higher. That faculty of hope which so often had misled her becomes the grace of her condition and a virtue. She moves the whole world in the interest of her misfortunes; she stirs it with a charm all-powerful. Her cause transforms and magnifies itself. It is no longer that of a passionate and heedless woman punished for her frailties and her inconstancy; it is that of the legitimate heiress of the crown of England, exposed in her dungeon to the eyes of the world, a faithful, unshaken Catholic, who refuses to sacrifice her faith to the interests of her ambition or even to the salvation of her life. The beauty and grandeur of such a rôle were fitted to stir the tender and naturally believing heart of Marie Stuart. She fills her soul with that rôle; she substitutes it, from the first moment of her captivity, for all her former personal sentiments, which, little by little, subside and expire within her as the fugitive occasions which aroused them pass away. She seems to remember them no more than she does the waves and the foam of those brilliant lakes that she has crossed. For nineteen years the whole of Catholicity is disquieted and impassioned about her; and she is there, half-heroine, half-martyr, making the signal and waving her banner behind the bars. Captive that she was, do not accuse her of conspiring against Elizabeth; for with her ideas of right divine and of absolute kingship from sovereign to sovereign, it was not conspiring, she being a prisoner, to seek for the triumph of her cause; it was simply pursuing the war.