Hosack distinctly charges Mr. Froude with "inventing fictions," and, moreover, sustains the charge. The aim of Mr. Hosack's work is not so much to write the life of Mary Stuart as to demonstrate that her accusers were guilty of the very crime (the murder of Darnley) of which they charge her, and that she was innocent, not only of that, but of any intrigue with Bothwell. Passing over in silence the period of Mary's residence in France, our author rapidly glances at the salient points in the administration of Mary of Lorraine, the mother of Mary Stuart, an admirable character, whose energy, integrity, resolution, and fortitude would have adorned the character of the greatest sovereign that ever reigned. Mr. Hosack thus speaks of her death: "The words of the dying princess, at once so magnanimous and gentle, were listened to with deep emotion by the Protestant chiefs, who, though in arms against her authority, all acknowledged and admired her private virtues. Amidst the tears of her enemies, thus died the best and wisest woman of the age." Knox alone, adds Mr. Hosack, sought by means of the most loathsome slanders to vilify the character of this excellent princess; and it was no doubt at his instigation that the rites of Christian burial were denied to her remains in Scotland. Mr. Hosack then takes up the history of Mary from the period of her arrival in Scotland, and ends with the commencement of her imprisonment in England. Mary came to reign over a country virtually in the power of a band of violent and rapacious lords, long in rebellion against their king. Of the five royal Jameses, three had perished, victims of their aristocratic anarchy. The personal piety of these rebellious lords was infinitesimal; but they had an enormous appreciation of Henry VIII.'s plunder of the monasteries and division of the church lands among the nobles, and desired to see Scotland submitted to the same regimen--they, of course, becoming ardent reformers. The young queen soon won the hearts of the people of Edinburgh by her sweetness and grace. One of her first experiences was the remarkable interview with Knox, in which he bore himself as properly became "the ruffian of the Reformation," while Mary, a girl of nineteen, utterly overcame him in self-possession, logic, and command of citation from the Old Testament. The man was brimful of vanity. The wound rankled, and from that moment he was Mary Stuart's personal enemy. Long before Mary's arrival, Knox and his friends had obtained full sway. The reformers had destroyed the monastic establishments in the central counties, and, under the influence of Knox, had an "act" passed for the total destruction of what they called "monuments of superstition;" the monuments of superstition in question being all that Scotland possessed of what was most valuable in art and venerable in architecture.