500.) We might have supposed that his restraint was not of long duration, as he is named among the hostages left in England, at the treaty of Berwick, 27th February 1559-60; a circumstance of which Knox could not have been ignorant, as he gives a copy of the confirmation of the treaty by the Duke of Chastelherault and the Lords of the Congregation; but it appears from one of the articles in the treaty of peace in July, that Lord David Hamilton, who was still a prisoner at Bois de St. Vincent, in France, then obtained liberty to return to Scotland; and he arrived at Edinburgh in October 1560. We are therefore warranted to infer that this portion of the Second Book of his History, must have been written towards the end of the year 1559. Knox himself in his general Preface, says, the intention was to have limited the period of the History from the year 1558, until the arrival of Queen Mary from France to assume the government in this country, in August 1561; thus extending the period originally prescribed beyond the actual attainment of the great object at which the Reformers aimed, in the overthrow of Popish superstition, and the establishment by civil authority of the Protestant faith, which was actually secured by the proceedings of the Parliament that met at Edinburgh on the 1st of August 1560. But he further informs us, that he was persuaded not only to add the First Book as an Introduction, but to continue the Narrative to a later period. This plan of extending the work he carried into effect in the year 1566, when the First and Fourth Books were chiefly written, and when there is reason to believe that he revised and enlarged the intermediate portion, at least by dividing it into two parts, as Books Second and Third. The Fourth Book extends to the year 1564; and he seems to intimate that he himself had no intention to continue the History to a later period; for alluding to the death of David Riccio, in March 1565-6, he says, "of whom we delay now farther to speik, becaus that his end will requyre the descriptioun of the whole, _and referris it unto suche as God sall rayse up to do the same_;" and a marginal note on this passage, written probably by Richard Bannatyne in 1571, says "_This ves never done be this Authour_."