was one of those nobly rash undertakings which succeed because, humanly speaking, success is impossible.

We have attempted to enumerate, with an incompleteness of which we are fully conscious, but for which a loving intention may partly compensate, some of the characteristics of Father Faber's work in the Church-some of his most obvious titles to our affectionate reverence and gratitude. It remains only to speak briefly of that which will probably prove to be, in future years, the most fruitful and permanent of all the benefits which he has bequeathed

to us.

We have said that Father Faber was one of those whose work lives after them. We have seen this admitted by the Holy Father, and recognized in emphatic terms by Cardinal Wiseman. "You have brought the spirit of S. Philip into London," said the latter to the dying Oratorian, "which will ever continue alive and active in his children." "Of the twenty-seven members of the community subject to him," says one who on this point could speak with more authority than the Cardinal himself, "there were only four who had not been brought to S. Philip by his guidance, and none who did not feel the more, as years went on, that their religious perseverance and progress were dependent upon him more than upon any other human influence."* It is, then, by the grateful confession of its own members, to Father Faber that we owe what the Cardinal called in a solemn hour "the great edifice of the Oratory." If we shrink from expressing in our own language our sense of what English Catholics owe, and will continue to owe, to the Fathers of the Oratory, it is only because we have no claim to be the interpreters of a sentiment which we believe to be universal, and because we prefer to acknowledge in the silence of our own hearts an obligation which may be better acquitted by following their counsels than by praising their acts. This only we will say :-If zeal without intemperance, and enthusiasm tempered by discretion; if watchfulness combined with patience, and fidelity as teachers united with obedience as subjects; if testimony to the highest spiritual truth illustrated by the purest Christian example; if these are titles to our love and esteem, we find them in those who have inherited Father Faber's mission, as well as "the spirit of S. Philip," in which he accomplished it. Happy are we," says an American Father of the Society of Jesus, with whose words we may appropriately conclude, "in the knowledge that there are many, on this side of the great waters,' who cannot think of the Fathers of the English Oratory without sentiments of profound gratitude, admiration, and respect. Their labours, their sacrifices, their virtues, their victories for God and His Church, in a word, all that they have done, have done so well,

* Life, p. 504,

in so short a time, and are still doing, for the temporal and eternal welfare of God's world,-rise up like a blessed vision of peace between us whenever some Government pique ruffles the temper of our kindred nations. At such moments the earnest but almost unanswered wish of England's great Cardinal-for how can we speak of the English Oratory and not be full of the memory of Cardinal Wiseman ?-again presses us to entreat that prayer, daily prayer, may be offered up, especially in our religious houses, for the conversion of England and its people.

ART. VI.-MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS.-THE CASKET PAPERS.

1. Mary Queen of Scots and Her Accusers. Embracing a Narrative of Events from the Death of James V., in 1542, until the Death of the Regent Murray, in 1570. By JOHN HOSACK, Barrister-at-Law. 8vo. Blackwood & Sons. Edinburgh and London. 1869.

2. Mary Stuart: Her Guilt or Innocence. An Inquiry into the Secret History of Her Times. By ALEXANDER MCNEEL-CAIRD. With Reply to Mr. Froude. 8vo. Edinburgh. Black, 1866.

Second edition. Adam & Charles

3. History of England, from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. By JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE, M.A. Reign of Elizabeth (vols. vii.—x.). 8vo. London. Longman & Co. 1864-6.

4. The History of Scotland from Agricola's Invasion to the Revolution of 1688. By JOHN HILL BURTON. 8vo. (Vol. iv.) Blackwood & Sons. 1867.

5. Marie Stuart et le Comte de Bothwell. Par L. WIESENER. 8vo. Paris. 1863.

6. Marie Stuart et ses derniers Historiens. Par L. WIESENER. (Revue des Questions Historiques. Deuxième Année. Livraisons 8-10.) 8vo. Paris. Victor Palmé.

MR.

1868.

R. HOSACK'S volume affords an opportunity for which we have been anxiously waiting. We have more than oncet expressed our belief that the whole case of Mary Queen of Scots, not alone as regards the Darnley murder, but as to

* American edition of "The Creator and the Creature," Introduction, P. xii.

+ Dublin Review, vol. xxxii. p. 145, and New Series, vol. iii. p. 109,

almost every other detail of the charges against her, may be said to turn upon a single point-the genuineness of her alleged letters to Bothwell, commonly known as the "Casket Letters." If these letters be indeed genuine, there is no conceivable crime too atrocious not to be credible of her as the writer. If, on the contrary, these letters be forged, she must be regarded as the victim of a conspiracy so foul and so recklessly wicked that we may justly look with distrust, if not with positive disbelief, upon every allegation of her enemies, even in matters not connected with the direct subject of the conspiracy.

In Mr. Hosack's careful and learned review of the controversy as to the guilt or innocence of Queen Mary, these famous letters occupy a prominent place; but the discussion regarding them suffers in point of clear and consecutive arrangement by being mixed up with the stirring incidents of the general narrative; and although there is no portion of Mr. Hosack's elaborate essay which is not deserving of the closest study, we have resolved to separate the critical from the historical discussion, and to confine ourselves in the present paper to this single branch of the inquiry. We have already, in reviewing M. Mignet's "Life of Mary Stuart," and in our notice of the seventh and eighth volumes of Mr. Froude's "History of England," entered at some length into the extrinsic evidences of the authenticity of the contents of the casket. But Mr. Hosack, as well by reproducing the text of the letters, as by carefully bringing together all the scattered fragments of contemporary narrative which can serve to illustrate or to test the incidents and allusions which are disclosed in the correspondence, has supplied many new materials for the illustration of the intrinsic evidence bearing on the question of its authenticity; and he thus enables us to reconsider the subject with the special advantage of having under view at one and the same time both the intrinsic and the extrinsic arguments which may be advanced upon either side.

The Casket Papers, it is true, are confined within comparatively narrow limits, and the really important letters profess to have been written within a very small number of days at two different periods. But in their allusions and in the associations which they suggest, they cover the whole period of the Darnley conspiracy and the Bothwell marriage; and it is through circumstances and incidents derived exclusively from them and entirely unsupported by other authority, that the most damning evidence of the guilt of the unhappy princess is derived. In the manner of dealing with these documents,

there is a very marked difference between the courses taken by the two latest historians of the period, Mr. Froude in his History of England, and Mr. Burton in the fourth volume of his History of Scotland.

Mr. Froude has made them the text of his narrative of the married life of the Queen with Darnley, and has drawn mainly from them the history of Darnley's murder, with all the antecedent and subsequent history. With characteristic impetuosity he assumes their authenticity from the outset. He accepts the incidents and statements which they supply, as matters which it is impossible to doubt "without turning history into a mere creation of imaginative sympathies."* He accompanies this assumption, it is true, with a promise that the authenticity, assumed for the moment, should be discussed in a later volume, in connection with the history of the discovery of the papers and with the examination which then took place. How far he has fulfilled that pledge, we shall have occasion to see.

On the contrary, Mr. Burton, throughout his narrative of Mary's reign, rigorously abstains, up to the very day on which the correspondence between the queen and Bothwell is said to have been discovered on the arrest of Bothwell's servant Dalgleish, from all use of the Casket Letters, and from all allusion to their contents; and in a most especial manner he professes to refrain from employing the Casket Letters, or any circumstance, allusion, or motive, which is only known through them, for the purpose of incriminating Mary, or of giving to facts otherwise known, but in themselves indifferent, a colouring unfavourable to her.

We confess that both these modes of procedure appear to us indefensible on any sound judicial or historical principle. Either the "Casket Letters" are genuine, or they are not. If they be genuine, they are, from the very first point of the narrative with which they connect themselves, necessary materials of the history of Mary Stuart and Bothwell-essential elements of any rational judgment as to the guilt or innocence of either or of both. If they be not genuine, it is equally plain, not only that the incidents or suspicions which they supply must be at once discarded from the inquiry, but that the very fact of their forgery becomes, even at the first point of the tragical story to which it belongs, a vitally significant circumstance ;-first as influencing the judgment which is to be formed regarding the particular facts which depended

History of England, viii. p. 352. + History of Scotland, iv. p. 428.

solely on the authority of the documents; and secondly, as suggesting the strongest suspicion of the general credibility of the allegations which this fraudulent fabrication of evidence was intended to sustain. If it be too much to rest, as we have already suggested, the entire case of Mary Stuart on this single suggestion, no one can doubt that the truly philosophical course must be, first of all to investigate the genuineness of these as well as of the other matters laid in evidence in the cause, and then, according to the result to frame the narrative, in its integrity and in its natural sequence, from the very earliest incident related or alluded to in the supposed correspondence between the actors in the story.

Still, of the courses pursued by the two historians respectively, no one can doubt that, if Mr. Burton's caution has led to the possible withdrawal of important elements of the historical verdict, Mr. Froude's summary procedure is, in relation to the issue of the controversy, by far the more mischievous in itself and the less defensible on philosophical grounds. His History of England, as the reader is aware, has been published in divisions, the successive instalments of which have been separated by considerable intervals. The story of Mary Stuart, in consequence, is presented to his readers, not as a whole, nor even in complete periods distinct and well separated from each other, but in disjointed fragments, each necessarily having a bearing upon the antecedents or the consequents of the general history, or upon both. It is quite impossible to consider the murder of Darnley except in connection with Mary's subsequent marriage; and the Casket Letters are darkly but inseparably associated with both. As a consequence of this fragmentary publication of Mr. Froude's work, the story of Mary has been told in three successive divisions; the first, in the seventh and eighth volumes, issued in 1863; the second, in the ninth and tenth, which were published in 1866; and the third, iu the eleventh and twelfth, which have just appeared while we are engaged on the present paper. The first of these divisions of the story broke off, in 1863, with the murder of Darnley, nor were the subsequent events resumed till 1866. Now the Casket Letters belong to both periods alike, and indeed their criminatory revelations fall far more heavily upon Mary in the former. And yet, throughout the whole narrative as published in 1863, Mr. Froude not only assumed their genuineness, but, as we pointed out in a former notice, interwove into his picturesque story every criminatory fact which the letters supply; presented every incident and every circumstance in the light of the motives of action which the letters disclose,