After recording the condemnation of the waiting-woman and her lover, Knox tells a false story about ‘shame hastening the marriage’ of Mary Livingstone. Dr. Robertson, in his ‘Inventories of Queen Mary,’ refutes this slander, which he deems as baseless as the fables against Knox’s own continence. Knox adds: ‘What bruit the Maries and the rest of the danseris of the Courte had, the ballads of that age did witness, quhilk we for modesteis sake omit.’ Unlucky omission, unfortunate ‘modestei’! From Randolph’s Letters it is known that Knox, at this date, was thundering against ‘danseris.’ Here, then, is a tale of the Queen’s French waiting-woman hanged for murder, and here is proof that there actually were ballads about the Queen’s Maries. These ladies, as we know from Keith, were, from the first, in the Queen’s childhood, Mary Livingstone, Mary Seatoun, Mary Beatoun, and Mary Fleming. We have, then, a child-murder, by a woman of the Queen, we have ballads about her Maries, and, as Scott says, ‘the tale has suffered great alterations, as handed down by tradition, the French waiting-woman being changed into Mary Hamilton, and the Queen’s apothecary into Henry Darnley,’ who, as Mr. Child shows, was not even in Scotland in 1563. But gross perversion of contemporary facts does not prove a ballad to be late or apocryphal. Mr. Child even says that accuracy in a ballad would be very ‘suspicious.’ Thus, for example, we know, from contemporary evidence, that the murder of the Bonny Earl Murray, in 1592, by Huntley, was at once made the topic of ballads. Of these, Aytoun and Mr. Child print two widely different in details: in the first, Huntley has married Murray’s sister; in the second, Murray is the lover of the Queen of James VI. Both statements are picturesque; but the former is certainly, and the latter is probably, untrue. Again, ‘King James and Brown,’ in the Percy MS., is accepted as a genuine contemporary ballad of the youth of gentle King Jamie. James is herein made to say to his nobles,-- ‘My grandfather you have slaine, And my own mother you hanged on a tree.’ Even if we read ‘father’ (against the manuscript) this is absurd. James V. was not ‘slaine,’ neither Darnley nor Mary was ‘hanged on a tree.’ Ballads are always inaccurate; they do not report events, so much as throw into verse the popular impression of events, the magnified, distorted, dramatic rumours. That a ballad-writer should promote a Queen’s tirewoman into a Queen’s Marie, and substitute Darnley (where HE is the lover, which is not always) for the Queen’s apothecary, is a license quite in keeping with precedent. Mr. Child, obviously, would admit this. In producing a Marie who never existed, the ‘maker’ shows the same delicacy as Voltaire, when he brings into ‘Candide’ a Pope who never was born.