5. The contents of the Letter are said to be incoherent and inconsistent with Mary’s style and character. The last objection is worthless. In the Letter she says that she acts ‘against her natural’--_contre son naturel_--out of character. As for incoherence, the items of her memoranda are closely followed in sequence, up to paragraph 8, and the interloping part in paragraph 12. The rest, the work of the second night, _is_ incoherent, as Mary’s moods, if she was guilty, must have been. Information, hatred, remorse, jealousy, and passion are the broken and blended strata of a mind rent by volcanic affections. The results in the Letter are necessarily unlike the style and sentiment of Mary’s authentic letters, except in certain very remarkable features. Either Mary wrote the Letter or a forger wished to give the impression that this occurred. He wanted the world to believe that the Queen, her conscience tortured and her passion overmastering her conscience, could not cease to converse with her lover while paper served her turn. Her moods alternate: now she is resolved and cruel, now sick with horror, but still, sleepless as she is, she must be writing. Assuredly if this Letter be, in part at least, a forgery, it is a forgery by a master in the science of human nature. We seem to be admitted within the room where alone a light burns through the darkling hours, and to see the tormented Queen who fears her pillow. She writes, ‘I would have almaist had pitie of him.... He salutes everybody, yea unto the least, and makes pitious caressing unto them, to make them have pitie on hym,’ a touching picture. There is a pendant to this picture of Darnley, in Buchanan’s ‘History.’ He is speaking of Mary’s studied neglect of Darnley at the time of his son’s christening (December, 1566). Darnley, he says, endured all ‘not only with patience; he was seen trying to propitiate her unjust anger in every way, _that humbly, and almost in servile fashion_, he might keep some share in her good graces.’[350] What an etching is this of the man, a little while since so haughty and tyrannous, ‘dealing blows where he knew that they would be taken’! Again the passage (Letter II. 11) about Mary’s heart wherein only Bothwell’s ‘shot’ can make a breach, does certainly seem (as Laing notes) to refer to a sonnet of Mary’s favourite poet, Ronsard. Depuis le jour que la première flèche De ton bel oëil m’avança la douleur, Et que sa blanche et sa noire couleur, Forçant ma force, _au cœur me firent brèche_. As in later letters, the writer now shows jealousy of Bothwell’s wife.