26 mere creation of imaginative sym

pathies, I do not feel at liberty to doubt. They come to us, after having passed the keenest scrutiny both in England and Scotland. The hand"writing was found to resemble so exactly that of the Queen, that the "most accomplished expert could detect "no difference. One of these letters "could have been invented only by a genius equal to that of Shakspeare; "and that one, once accomplished, "would have been so overpoweringly "sufficient for its purpose, that no "forger would have multiplied the

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chances of detection by adding the "rest. The inquiry at the time appears, "to me, to supersede authoritatively all "later conjectures. The English Coun"cil, among whom were many friends "of Mary Stuart, had the French originals before them, while we have only translations, or translations of "translations."

But even those, it seems to me, are enough. Read that one letter, of which Mr. Froude well says, "that it could "have been invented only by the genius "of a Shakspeare ;" and judge whether it could have been written by any human being save by a woman, "at "that strange point where her criminal "passion becomes almost virtue by its "self-abandonment."

"I must go forward with my odious 66 purpose. You make me dissemble so "far that I abhor it. If it were not to obey you, I had rather die than "do it.

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shame; to have made Mary's highest object, not the gratification of her own pleasure, but Bothwell's good opinion; to have represented her, and not him, as the suppliant and the slave? One can imagine-because one knows the drama of those days--what sort of stuff a forger would have put into Mary's mouth-stuff worthy of a stage Semiramis or Messalina: but instead, we find words such as no man-perhaps not even Shakspeare-could invent or imagine; words which prove their own authenticity, by their most fantastic and unexpected, yet most simple and pathetic, adherence to human nature. Those who doubt the terrible fact of Mary's having written that letter, must know as little of the laws of internal evidence as of the tricks of the human heart.

It can be no pleasure to go into such matters; no pleasure to believe any woman an adulteress and a murderess. But as often as the relation of Elizabeth and Mary is brought before us, so often, at least for some years to come, will it be necessary to recollect clearly what it was. The whole matter, ever since Mr. Hume wrote his historyhas been overlaid with misstatements, caused, probably, by mere sentimentality, but just as dangerous as if they had been spread about by Father Parsons and the Jesuits themselves, for the express purpose of putting into the minds of men an entirely false view of the case. The sixteenth century Jesuits, however (with some show of sense, as from their point of view), spoke of Mary as a martyr, dying in defence of the Holy Roman faith: it was reserved for modern Protestants to broach the monstrous theory that she was sacrificed to the jealousy of Elizabeth. That notion might, indeed, have something tragic and terrible about it, false as it is, if it could only be proved that the two great Queens were in love with the same man at the same moment, and fought Titanically for the prize. But as the favoured personage required by that hypothesis has not yet been discovered in history, it remains that Elizabeth could have been jealous merely of Mary's superior beauty

--and, indeed, one has seen the case actually so put, by some wiseacre who had probably never taken the trouble to consider what a deliberate and diabolical wickedness, extending over many years, he was imputing to the English Queen.

Certainly, if such people had wished to further the influence of the Romish Church over the public mind, they could have devised no method of treating history better calculated to do so, than to represent this long and internecine battle between Protestantism and Popery as merely the private quarrel of two handsome and ambitious women. And, therefore, it is necessary to repeat again and again, that Mary Queen of Scots was not merely heir to the throne of England, but that she considered and declared herself the rightful queen thereof during the lifetime of Elizabeth. That she was the hope and mainstay of the Popish party, both in England and in Scotland, and the wily and unscrupulous foe of that Protestant cause which has been the strength and the glory of both countries alike. That for that very reason Elizabeth shrank from acknowledging her as her heir, because she knew (as Mr. Froude well shows) that to do so was to sign her own deathwarrant; that she would have been shortly murdered by some of those fanatics, who were told by the Pope and the Jesuits that her assassination was a sacred duty. That Mary, by her crimes, alienated from her not her own subjects-they had had too much reason to hate her already-but her Catholic friends in France, Spain, and England; and thus enabled Elizabeth to detain her in captivity as the only security against one who was an open conspirator, and pretender to the throne during her life; and finally, on the discovery of fresh plots against her crown, and the liberties and religion of England, which had by then become identified with the Protestant cause, to bring her to the scaffold. The justice or injustice of that sentence will, no doubt, be discussed by Mr. Froude in a future volume, as ably and fairly as he has in these volumes discussed Mary's original guilt; and if he shall give his verdict against

Queen Elizabeth-and therefore against the Lords and Commons of England, who concurred with her in the sentence -we are bound to listen patiently to his decision. No one can come cleanhanded out of such a long and fearful struggle; and the party which are in the right are but too certain, ere their work is done, to have likened themselves more than once to the party which is in the wrong.

But that Elizabeth and her party were in the right, and Mary and her party in the wrong, is to be remembered by every man who calls himself a Protestant; and any one who has observed the deep denationalization of mind now prevalent -not in the loyal, hereditary Catholics of these realms-but in those who have lately joined, or are inclined to join, the Church of Rome; their dissatisfaction with the whole course of English history since the Conquest, and of Scotch history since the days of great John Knox, for what, thank Heaven, it is-a perpetual rebellion against ultramontane tyranny; their outspoken contempt for all feelings and institutions which are most honoured by English or by Scotch: those, I say, who have observed this, will never lose an opportunity of reminding their fellow-countrymen, and especially the young, that they must, in justice to their native land, keep unstained and clear their broad sense of right and wrong; and remember that the cause which Elizabeth (with whatever inconsistencies and weaknesses) espoused, was the cause of freedom and of truth, which has led these realms to glory; the cause which Mary (with whatever excuses of early education) espoused, was the cause of tyranny and of lies, which would have led these realms to ruin; and that after all

Victrix Causa Diis placuit, et victa puellis.

What Mr. Froude will have to say on this subject, we shall wait patiently and hopefully to hear. But that he will take, in the main, the same view as has been taken in this last page, no one can doubt, who has read his already published volumes.

C. K.

THE Schoolhill in Aberdeen, a street of oldish houses, derived its name from its containing the public Grammar School of the town. There had been a Grammar School in the burgh, on or near this same site, for centuries; and in the records of the town frequent mention is made of this School, and of the names of its masters. Its most noted benefactor, in later days, had been Dr. Patrick Dun, Principal of Marischal College, in the first half of the seventeenth century. How many successive buildings of older make had served for the school before Dr. Dun's time, or what sort of building it was lodged in when he took interest in it, I can only vaguely guess through fancy, and through such occasional entries in the burgh accounts as that of a sum of 381. 58. 6d., in or about the year 1597, for "thecking the Grammar School with hedder." The School in my time was a plain, dingy building, which had been erected, I believe, in 1757, and which, if it was superior to some of its predecessors in not being thatched with heather, but slated and quite weathertight, was certainly nothing to look at architecturally. Within a gateway and iron-railed wall, separating the School from the street, and forming a very limited playground in front, you saw a low main building of a single storey parallel with the street, and having a door with stone steps in the middle, and windows at the sides; and from this main building there projected towards the street two equally low wings, forming the two junior class-rooms. Two similar wings, which you could not well see from the street, projected from the main building behind, and accommodated the senior classes. The only entrance to No. 51.--VOL, IX,

the two back class-rooms was through the public school; the two front class-rooms might also be entered through the public school, but had separate doors from the front playground. The arrangements inside were simple enough. Each of the four oblong class-rooms had a raised desk for the master in one angle and two rows of" factions" as they were calledi. e. wooden seats, with narrow sloping writing benches in front of them-along the two sides of the oblong, so as to leave a free passage of some width in the middle for the master, when he chose to walk from end to end. Each "faction" was constructed to hold four boys, so that the look of a full class-room was that of a company of boys seated in two parallel subdivisions of fours along the walls. In the public school, where meetings of all the classes together took place for general purposes, the main desk, a wooden structure of several tiers, was in the middle of the long side of the oblong, immediately opposite the main door, and there were four sets of somewhat larger" factions," where the several classes sat on such occasions, all looking inwards. The entire accommodation internally, as well as the look externally, was of the dingiest; nor was it, perhaps, very creditable to the town that, even in the middle of the eighteenth century, they should not have risen to a somewhat loftier idea of the sort of building suitable for a School that was already historical among them, and was still likely to be of importance. But boys think little of these things; and the low dingy building had for them many snug, and some venerable, associations. In these rows of factions," which they thumped energetically with sticks and

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fists at every meeting, making an uproar till the masters appeared, and over which at other times they leaped in a thousand fashions of chase and mutual fight, roaring out such tags of traditional schooldoggrel as

"Qui loupavit ower the factions
Solvet down a saxpence,"

they could not but have a dim idea that generations of young Aberdonians, either long defunct and in their graves, or scattered abroad in mature living manhood, had sat and made uproar before them. The very tags of doggrel they shouted had come down to them from these predecessors; and in the appearance of the "factions" themselves, all slashed and notched and carved over with names and initials of various dates deeply incised into the hard wood, there was a provocation to some degree of interest in the legends of the school. It was not in the nature of boyish antiquarianism to go back to the times of those older heather-thatched schoolbuildings, ancestors of the present, in which the Cargills and Wedderburns, and other early Scottish Latinists of note, had walked as masters; but some of the traditions of the existing fabric in the days of recent masters, whose names and characters were still proverbial, were within the reach of the least inquisitive. Among these traditions by far the most fascinating was that of Lord Byron's connexion with the school. When, in 1792, Byron's mother had separated from her husband, the profligate Captain Byron of the Guards, she, being by birth a Miss Gordon of Gicht in Aberdeenshire, had retired to Aberdeen with her little lame London-born boy, then not quite five years old, and with about 1307. a year saved from her fortune which her husband had squandered. The little fellow, living with his mother in the Broadgate, and catching up the Aberdeen dialect, which he never quite forgot, learnt his first lessons from two or three private tutors in succession, the last of whom he mentions as "a very serious, saturnine, but kind young man, named Patterson," the son of his shoemaker,

but a good scholar. "With him," he says, "I began Latin in Ruddiman's Grammar, and continued till I went to the Grammar School (Scotice Schule,' Aberdonice Squeel'), where I threaded all the classes to the fourth, when I was recalled to England, where I had been hatched, by the demise of my uncle." The fact thus lightly mentioned by Byron was, as may be supposed, no small splendour in the annals of Aberdeen. There were many alive in the town who remembered the lame boy well, and some who had been his schoolfellows. We used to fancy the

"faction" in which he had oftenest sat; and there was no small search for his name or initials, reported to be still visible, cut by his own hand, on one of the "factions"-always, I believe, without success. One school-legend about him greatly impressed us. It was said that, on his coming to school the first morning after his accession to the peerage was known, and on the calling out of his name in the catalogue no longer

as

"Georgi Gordon Byron" but as "Georgi, Baro de Byron," he did not reply with the usual and expected “Adsum," but, feeling the gaze of all his schoolfellows, burst into tears and ran out. But there are half a hundred Aberdeen myths about Byron, and this may be one of them.

The School was a grammar-school in the old sense of the term as understood in England as well as in Scotland. It was exclusively a day-school for classical education in preparation for the University. In fact, down to my time, it was all but entirely a Latin school. The rudiments of Greek had recently been introduced as part of the business of the higher classes; but, with this exception, and with the farther exception that, in teaching Latin, the masters might regale their classes with whatever little bits of history or of general lore they could blend with their Latin lessons, the business of the School was Latin, Latin, Latin. Since that time there have been changes in the constitution of the seminary to suit it to the requirements of more modern

tastes in education. There is now more of Greek, and express instruction in Geography, History, and I know not what all; but in those days it was Latin, nothing but a four or five years' perseverance in Latin, within those dingy old walls. Although the usual age at which boys entered the School was from eight to twelve, it was assumed that the necessary preliminary learning in matters of English, and in writing and arithmetic, had been gone. through beforehand; and, though there were public schools for writing, drawing, and mathematics, equally under the charge of the city-authorities with the Grammar School, and which the pupils of the Grammar School might attend at distinct hours for parallel instruction in those branches, these schools were not attached to the Grammar School, and attendance at them was quite optional. So, on the whole, if you were an Aberdeen boy, getting the very best education known in the place, you were committed, at the age of from nine to eleven, to a four or five years' course of drilling in Latin, five hours every day, save in the single vacation-month of July-tipped only with a final touch of Greek; and, this course over, you were expected, at the age of from thirteen to sixteen, either to walk forward into the University, or, if that prospect did not then suit, to slip aside, a scholar so far, into the world of business. A four or five years' course, I have said; for, though the full curriculum was five years, it was quite customary for readier or more impatient lads to leap to the University from the fourth class.

This exclusive, or all but exclusive, dedication of the School to Latin was partly a matter of fidelity to tradition; but there was a special cause for it in the circumstances of the intellectual system of the town, and, indeed, of that whole region of the North of Scotland of which the town was the natural capital. The School was the main feeder of the adjacent Marischal College and University of the City of Aberdeen, and it also sent pupils annually, though not in such great numbers, to the other

neighbouring University of King's College, Old Aberdeen. These two Universities, now united into one, were the Universities to which, for geographical reasons, all the scholarly youths of that northern or north-eastern region of Scotland which lay beyond the ranges of attraction of the other three Scottish Universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, and St. Andrew's, were naturally drawn. Whatever young man looked forward to a University education in this extensive region-of which Aberdeenshire itselfand the adjacent county of Kincardine forme d the heart, but which had Forfarshire, Banffshire, Morayshire, Invernesshire, Rosshire, and even more distant northerly parts for its fringes-thought of Aberdeen, and of one or other of its two Universities, as his destination while that education should be going on. The tendency from the Highland, and generally from the more northerly districts, was rather to King's College, while from Aberdeen itself, the eastern and lowland parts of Aberdeenshire, and from Kincardineshire and Forfarshire, the tendency was rather to Marischal College. But, to whichever of the two Universities the predisposition might be, the possibility of giving effect to it was, for many who cherished it, a matter of long preliminary anxiety. There were in that region of North Britain many wellto-do families, perfectly able to send their sons to either of the two Aberdonian Colleges, or even, if they so preferred, to Edinburgh or either of the English Universities; but in that region, more perhaps than in any other even of North Britain, there has always been a numerous class of whom it be said, may in Sydney's Smith's sense, Musam tenui meditantur avená, "They cultivate the "Muse, or the best rough Muse they "find accessible, on a little oatmeal." In other words, the ambition after a University education existed among a wider and poorer class in that region than is found to cherish a similar ambition elsewhere. The town of Aberdeen is included in this statement. The notion of a University education as possible descended very far down indeed among