homeless Clugniac monks. Yet, with silent generations gathered between us and it, history writes it golden, even in sight of spoiled abbeys, torn parchments, and ruin and decay.

OUTSIDE THE CLOISTER.

ALL places that the eye of heaven visits,
Are to a wise man ports and happy havens,-
Teach thy necessity to reason thus;

There is no virtue like necessity.

Think not the king did vanish thee,
But thou the king.

"King Richard Second."

ITH his mitre left behind him, and his unfulfilled vows, we greet the lord Claude in history when seven years have past. There has dawned that sweet hopeful May-time, when the queen is a queen once more; and the fisher-boat, with its precious freight, comes into the ancient little jetty; and one more happy sunset gleams on Mary's white veil, and on the mail of the fifty cavaliers who are loyal to her for love.

It was at the little port of Queensferry that lord Claude, with his fifty armed Hamiltons, met the escaped queen, in her flight from Lochleven Castle, The ferry was very old,

Another queen,

and already inwrought with history. Saxon Margaret, had passed often to and fro, and shed over it those sacred memories which her presence left everywhere. And her great-grandson, Malcolm Fourth, had granted the right of the ferry to the favoured monks of Dunfermline, a spot which Margaret loved. He had also, this same king Malcolm, granted a similar right to Scone, to the abbot, the monks, and their men," of free passage at Portoun Reginæ. The footprints of the old monks were already set deeply in the soil here, where the young quondam abbot of Paisley, with his vassals, waited for the queen.

Her biographers have traced, sympathetically, that last scene bright to the queen. Queen Mary is the heroine of many pages; lord Claude is the hero of this. He exacts a large meed of interest even in the charmed presence of the lovely discrowned princess, whose story all the world has hung upon.

A night at Niddry Castle, and the Almond water near, and near it, too, old Elieston, a hunting-tower of the kings; and the wearied queen finds rest and honour and hospitality under the roof of lord Seton,—a moment of the "Chamber called Peace," one little interlude of gladness in her long tired way.

But we turn, with a soft askance, from this queen wrapped in story, and link her journey, in a dim romance, with the distant bridal of lord Claude. Some patient years after this, he wedded Margaret Seton, a younger daughter of the house where he rested that night with his vassals. Through the tremors and disquiet of history, imagination

claims still the right to listen for, and the sense to hear, these soft under-tones of life, which are always glad through sorrow, and always restful through pain. They are needed to take from broader story the sense of harsh inequalities, of power triumphant, and of power crushed; of the better striving through the worse, and the worse absorbing the better; and always of strife which is itself evil, unkindly to pure effort, unkindly to gentle thought.

To greet a simple pure emotion on any beaten track of history, charms us like a loved little wayside flower on a foreign battle-field. The emotion is not recorded; we fill it in of ourselves, this and much more which none have thought worthy to tell us.

One May-night, and again the queen is abroad in her unquiet country. But the Hamiltons are loyal and strong, and the queen hopes. And when lord Claude next appears, it is at Langside, commanding the queen's vanguard on that fatal day for poor Mary.

Lord Claude, with his royal descent, proud youth, and accustomed supremacy, hotly contests with the earl of Argyle for the command of the whole army. And Mary must decide the contest, very hard to decide; and because of nearer kinship, she prefers the earl of Argyle. And so, as so often occurred among the barons of Scotland, there was dispute and jealousy, without any show of concealment. Lord Claude would not brook that the Hamiltons should yield to the Stewarts. He had not learned the church's lessons of self-abnegation and meekness. He must have been a haughty abbot, even with his eighteen years.

And Mary saw it all, under the white hawthorn; saw the