she arrived on the 22d of July. Crossing the Clyde and making a long round through Ayrshire and the Stewartry to St Mary's Isle, it was the late autumn before she regained the capital. The spring of 1564 was passed in Fife; then in July, Parliament having been dissolved, she went to the great deer-hunt in Athol, where "three hundred and sixty deer, with five wolves, and some roes," were slain; crossed the "Mounth to Inverness; visited the Chanonry of Ross; and returning leisurely by the east coast, reached Holyrood on the 26th of September. She was at Wemyss Castle in Fife when, on 16th February 1565, she met Darnley for the first time; and it is probable that she was with Athol at Dunkeld some time in June of the same year, for it was on her return from the Highlands that, hearing of the plot of the disaffected nobles to kidnap her lover and herself, she rode from Perth by the Queensferry in one day to Lord Livingston's house of Callendar-a ride of not less than forty miles. During most of this time Maitland, as the Prime Minister of the Queen, was the most conspicuous figure at the Scottish Court. In all Scotland, indeed, no man, Knox only excepted, was more widely known, or, upon the whole, more widely liked. He had attained a great political position; and Mary, one of the most generous of women, was even extravagantly munificent to her favourite ministers. She created her brother, the Lord James, Earl of Moray, enriching him with the spoil of half-ascore of abbeys; the revenues of Crossraguel were given to Buchanan; and out of the Church lands round Haddington ample provision was made for Maitland. "At my arrival at Dunbar, I heard that the Lord of Ledington was at Ledington, taking possession of the whole abbacy which the Queen had given him, so that he is now equal with any man that hath his whole lands lying in Lothian. I chanced upon him there, and accompanied him the next day to Edinburgh." Many of the men who had been the recipients of Mary's bounty came by-and-by to conspire against her: Buchanan took away her good name, Moray her crown; but Maitland, as I expect to be able to show, was never ungrateful to his liberal mistress. The relations between them were from first to last (with hardly a break) intimate and cordial. There can be no doubt, I think, that Maitland was warmly attached to Mary. He vindicated her title; he advocated her claims; he believed quite sincerely that, supported as she was by the great nobles and the mass of the common people in 1 1 Randolph to Cecil, Dec. 13, 1563. either realm, she was in the end bound to win; and though his confidence must have been sometimes severely tried, yet even when her fortunes grew hopeless, he clung to the cause which he had made his own with obstinate fidelity, and he laid down his life in a service which had become desperate. The personal fascination of the Queen unquestionably accounts for several incidents in his career which, on any other theory of the motives by which he was influenced, would appear inexplicable. It must be frankly admitted that on more than one occasion his policy, as her minister, could not have been dictated by political considerations only; and we are driven to conclude that even the cool and wary diplomatist had not been insusceptible to "the enchantment whereby men are bewitched." Of the policy, civil and ecclesiastical, which Maitland pursued, of his attitude to the great political and religious problems of the age, I have now to speak; and I shall endeavour to do so as clearly and briefly as is practicable. It is necessary that the arguments which weighed with the men to whom he was opposed should be fairly stated; and I propose to state them, as far as need be, in their own words. In this chapter, therefore, the chief figures will be Maitland and-Knox; in the next, Maitland and-Cecil. The most charming and spontaneous of German lyrists insists, in his essay on the Romantic revival, that Leo X. was just as zealous a Protestant as Luther. Luther's protest at Wittenberg was in Latin prose; Leo's at Rome in stone and colour and ottava rhymes. "Do not the vigorous marbles of Michael Angelo, Giulio Romano's laughing nymph - faces, and the lifeintoxicated merriment in the verses of Master Ludovico, offer a protesting contrast to the old gloomy withered Catholicism?" And he concludes that the painters of Italy, "plunging into the sea of Grecian mirthfulness," combated priestdom more effectively than the Saxon theologians; and that the Venus of Titian was a better treatise against an ascetic spirituality than that nailed to the church door of Wittenberg. The bubbles blown by a jester like Heine are sometimes more suggestive than the weightiest argument of the moralist. No one knew better than Heine did that the passage from which I have quoted was in one sense (the Italian renascence being in comparison with the German sterile if not corrupt) extravagantly unfair. But it is not to be denied that in another and possibly a larger sense it is the simplest statement of fact. The Reformation, in its initiation and in its essence, was a measure of enfranchisement. It was a mental, as well as a moral and spiritual, revolt; the aspiration of the intellect for "an ampler ether," as well as the aspiration of the conscience for "a diviner air." The Church of Rome, which had once done much for the freedom of mankind,1 had latterly become a burden too heavy to be borne. A colossal system of priestcraft, of sacerdotal pretences and sacramental mystifications, was supported by sanctions which, when not artificial, were immoral. The Maker of heaven and earth could only be approached through the priest; the priest was often a man of ill-repute; the penalties of wrong-doing were remitted, the grace of God was secured, not by repentance and amendment of life, but by the conjuring of a consecrated caste; pardons for past sins, indulgences for future sins, might be bought for money. This clerical absolutism, as arbitrary as it was unconscientious, as sordid as it was corrupt, as hurtful to intellectual freedom and political liberty as to the spiritual life, was the system which the Reformers undertook to abolish. But-happily or unhappily, according to the point of view-few of the Reformers had any 1 Even Heine, in the essay | from which I have quoted, admits that the Catholic Church had had a wholesome effect on "the over-robust" races of the North. |