in order to bring to trial" the murderers of the King, (p. 28.) Rizzio's murder took place "in the drawing-room of the Queen at the Castle of Edinburgh," (vol. i. p. 226.) Mary, on her arrival from France, "disembarks at Leith, having escaped the vessels of Queen Elizabeth, which, however, took one of her galleys. Having made a short stay at the Abbey of Lislebourg, she proceeds to Edinburgh," (vol. i. p. 7.) Lislebourg was the French name for Edinburgh, as it was then surrounded by so many lochs. The Queen, therefore, first "makes a short stay at" Edinburgh, and then proceeds to Edinburgh. "Mary appoints James Murray (her natural brother,) and Maitland, her prime ministers," (vol. i. p. 7.) This, we presume, is James Stuart, Earl of Murray. After the battle of Carberry Hill, "the tyrants took her (the Queen) to the Kirk-at-field, and shut her up in the house where her husband's corpse had been carried, after his murder, and had laid till his burial," (vol. iii. p. 28.) The Queen was first taken to the Provost's house, and then carried to Holyrood Palace-(Tytler, vol. vii. p. 112,)—which evidently affords no room for heroics against the tyrants. "Lady Douglas "

(at Lochleven) "treated the captive Queen with the utmost indignity, telling her she was but a mock Queen, and that she had usurped the Crown from the Earl of Murray, who, she said, was in reality the right heir, boasting that she was the lawful wife of James the Fifth," (vol. iii. p. 29.) There is not a word of this in authentic history. Bothwell, it appears, "was turned of fifty, coarse and ugly," (vol. iii. p. 124.) It is one of the points long ago incontestably settled in this controversy, that Bothwell was not thirty when he married Mary. (Hailes, vol. iii. p. 80, edit. 1819.) What is meant in another place by "later documentary histories of the minutes of the Scottish Parliament and English Privy Council," we have been totally at a loss to comprehend. (Vol. iii. p. 273.) How a history can be other than documentary no dictionary will explain; and where such a history, or any other history of the minutes of the Parliament or Council exists, we humbly hope Miss Strickland will inform us.

These specimens will display the character of Miss Strickland's labours in the thorny field of Scottish history. We have confined ourselves to a few improvements of her own; but with

regard to those of other people, she certainly shows that there is no opinion, however incredible or absurd, that, having had a parent, will die for want of a nurse. When she leaves narrative for philosophy or speculation, we have the Reformer denominated, with fluent flippancy, as "Master John;" and the whole population of Scotland dismissed with contemptuous epithets we need not cite. To dwell longer upon such an effusion, would be to honour it beyond its worth; and we have only noticed it from the circumstance that the lady has "in preparation, a personal memoir of Mary Queen of Scots, which in due time will be forthcoming." (Vol. iii. p. 1, Preface.) We implore Miss Strickland to remember, in the rapid concoction of her "histories," that the patience of the public is not illimitable, and that her unhappy reviewers would wish, if possible, to be the first to herald the praises she expects; but that, if unmindful of the fact, that bad books-bad in style, erroneous in facts, flippant and superficial

-are public nuisances, she will learn from the exposure to which they are doomed, that there will be no "future editions" to writers who have only half intelligence on subjects on which

they publish volumes, joined to the vanity of knowing everything without study, and deciding on everything without information.

But the work of Miss Strickland is one entire and perfect chrysolite, in comparison with the "Memoirs of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland, by L. Stanhope F. Buckingham," who often quotes Latin, and is once learned in Greek. This gentleman's performance is no dry marrowless anatomy. From the beginning to the end of his story, his tears never cease to fall. He is in a continual state of thaw and dissolution; and while the one hand was tracing the sorrows of his heroine, the other was busily engaged with a cambric handkerchief. The author intends to overwhelm us with sentiment and with eloquence; and figures arrayed in most fantastic drapery dance in his volumes, in the most approved style of metaphorical confusion. The heavens are rent with the thunders of Jove; Neptune raises commotions in the deep; and Pluto in ecstasy leaps from his throne. Aeronautic flights are taken into the cloudy regions of sentiment, amid the mists of which we have often found ourselves hopelessly lost. The

Minerva press never issued a work which, in its sympathies, has a more diffusive benevolence. Not Mary's sorrows alone lacerate the author's heart; but everything, animate and inanimate, that belonged to her—her letters, her chairs, her poodle, are canonized! Matters of fact are tortured with a kind of juvenile ingenuity, and the remark of Addison nearly holds true as to this as well as the other productions of the same school, that "it is impossible to carry on a modern controversy without the words scribbler, liar, rogue, rascal, knave, and villain." There is, in truth, nothing so inexpressibly tiresome as to travel through the mouthing passages winding out in immeasurable longitude to nothing. "Treading the crude consistence half on foot, half flying," we rise from it with the same sensation of utter weariness, and the same dreamy idea of Mary's history, and of the doings of the villains who beset her, as one would have if, under the influence of nightmare, the whole had been exhibited in the misty phantasmagoria of a dream.

We give one sentence as to the swamping of a boat belonging to Queen Mary, as a specimen of the style forcible-feeble :-" Scarcely had she set feet on board the vessel, which was to convey