capital, there is no doubt it was early occupied as a Roman fort, and Agricola is said to have given it his special attention prior to his crossing the Forth, bent on the invasion of Caledonia. In the twelfth century the fortress assumed a more imposing aspect, and when we reach the time of William the Lion we find him holding his Parliament within its walls, and even asking to be taken there to die. Burned by Wallace after the battle of Falkirk in 1298, the castle rose again under the care of Edward I., and it had been for ten years in the hands of the English, when Bannockburn declared in favour of a change of Occupants. The first James, who erected the oldest part of the present fortress, exhibited an early prepossession in favour of Stirling as a royal residence; and the fourth James found on the plain beneath more delight in his archery and bowls, than he perhaps found elsewhere in his dominions. The third James built the Chapel Royal and the once magnificent Parliament Hall, for ages the chief ornament of the castle; and the fifth James completed the palace, which, architecturally at least, is still perhaps the leading feature of the whole structure. In the castle the infant Mary was crowned Queen of Scots; and there, too, in after years, while she lay a prisoner in the picturesque solitude of Lochleven, her son was officially raised to the throne as James VI. And so the rough but stately fortress stands on its hoary diadem of pendant rocks to-day, reminding us by many a seamy scar of batties that have been fought around its walls; and conventions and conspiracies without number; of the pomp and pageantry of monarchs whose names live, some in hearts, others only in history. On the accession of James to the English Crown in 1603, the castle ceased to be a royal residence, and thus, where the Stuarts once reigned in glory, the tourist and the sight-seer are now found to be the dominating factors. The view from the battlements is really one of the finest in the country. On the west there spreads out before the eye the beautiful vale of LOCHLEVEN. Menteith, bounded by the "lofty Ben Lomond" and other peaks of the Grampian range; the Ochils stretch away towards Perth on the north and east, the view in the latter direction being greatly enhanced by the serpent windings of the Forth; away to the south is the Field of Bannockburn, and Bannockburn itself, and on the north-east side there is the pass of Ballangeich, which furnished James V. with the name of "The Gudeman o' Ballangeich," which it was his humour to adopt during his frequent wanderings. No wonder that Scott declared the town and its castle to be "An epitome of Edinburgh," both as to its picturesque surroundings and its romantic interest. The rivalry for the tiny hand of the newly-crowned queen received a check for a time on the field of Pinkie, where more than ten thousand Scotsmen bit the dust. Such a disastrous result had not been anticipated at Stirling, but now it was seen that the castle was no longer a safe retreat, and the young Queen was carried northward to an inaccessible isle in the lake of Menteith. Shortly before this the proposal had been made to bear her away to Tantallon Castle to be delivered to the Warden of the English Marches, but the idea was abandoned. The old fortress, standing on its rocky precipice within sight of the Bass Rock and the May Island, would certainly have been a safe retreat, for it had long mocked every military enterprise for its conquest. Even now it exhibits in its naked ruins a labyrinth of dismal sub large boxwood the centre of the planting by Mary in remembrance of the years of unalloyed tranquillity which she spent in this paradise of picturesque Perthshire. terranean dungeons which in former young Queen. A Inaccessible to those whose presence might mean danger, the "island of rest" was yet not out of the reach of diplomacy, and it was here that the prospective betrothal of Mary and the youthful Dauphin of France was arranged. The match with Edward was still being spoken of; but although to many of the Scottish people the prospect of a Romish king could hardly be welcome, it was felt that even religious intolerance would be preferable to civil aggrandisement, and so the proposed union with France was tardily agreed to. And now came for Mary the most important of all the changes her young life had hitherto experienced. It was provided that she should be sent to France to complete her education, and to make some acquaintance with the people over whom she could now look forward to rule as queen; and thus, at six years of age, we find her at the castle of Dumbarton, ready to embark at the Firth of Clyde on the galleys which had been sent from France for her transport. It was here that she was attacked by small-pox, but the disorder does not seem to have her character had time to unfold itself— had her talents been "as precocious as her beauty," it is impossible to conjecture. As it was, the reins of the Government of France, on account of her extreme youth, fell into the hands of her motherin-law, Catherine de Medici; and the death of the Queen Dowager of Scotland in 1560 having left the country without a ruler, Mary, with tears in her eyes and evil foreboding in her heart, bade adieu to the home of her girlhood's happy years, and set sail for her ancestral realm, where MARY STUART'S BEDCHAMBER, HOLYROOD. impaired her beauty in the least, otherwise we should certainly have heard of it in the descriptions of her person which so many contemporary admirers have left to us. At the French Court Mary soon became a favourite, partly for her charming manner and partly for her beauty. One who met her shortly after her landing wrote: "The young Queen was at that time one of the most perfect creatures that the God of Nature ever formed, for that her equal was nowhere to be found; nor had the world another child of her fortune and hopes." Alas! for the fortune and the hopes! Her marriage with the Dauphin proved to be but the prelude of her troubles. The union lasted less than three years, and Mary was left a widow while yet in her teens. What she would have done had Holyrood in the August of 1561 the country was convulsed with the throes of the Reformation, and therein lay the cause for much of the after trouble of her life. What the new faith of the people meant to one who had been led to look upon the Roman Catholic religion with a kind of holy reverence and fear may be easily imagined. Mary could not in reason be expected to forget her family traditions and give up a creed which, for aught she knew, might form as sure a pathway to heaven as that of the new Evangel. Yet this was what Knox expected her, nay, demanded, her to do; and much as one would like to forget the ecclesiastical wrangles of that early time, it is impossible to dissociate from the walls of Holyrood the memory of those rude and uncourtly interviews with the girlish Queen which have made the name of Knox so much less honourable to those who would otherwise have been inclined to regard the Reformer with feelings of gratitude and esteem. The vindictive intolerance of Knox prevented him from realising that it was no part of a queen's duty to change her religion because her subjects had changed theirs, and whatever was the end in view, the means by which he sought to gain that end were altogether intolerable. Why should the Queen of Scots abandon the faith of her fathers at the bidding of a rude commoner, who, by plated marriage with a Papist had to be denounced in language as fierce as it was uncalled for, notwithstanding that Knox himself, an austere, grey-bearded widower of sixty, was about to be united to a girl just escaping from her teens! One might have thought better of it all had the Reformer's own name been unsullied. But while he was using the liberty of the pulpit to compare his Queen to all the harlots, murderers and idolators in the sacred writings, he was himself not free of the suspicion of being privy to the conspiracy which led to the butchering of David Rizzio. "It was a most just act," said he, "and worthy of all praise." The conscience which had no toleration for an alleged heterodox belief could yet smile at the murder of a fellow mortal! I put the Scottish Reformer thus boldly to the front, because to him and to the rapacious faction for whom he was responsible-men who, for the most part, had no religion, no morals, no honour, no good faith, were due not a few of the unhappy hours of Mary's life at the palace of her ancient. capital. Of Holyrood itself so much has been written that it would be unwise to go over the ground again in detail. The history of the palace stretches away back to the time of David I., and on through all these centuries, first as monastic establishment, afterwards as royal residence, and latterly as a relic of ancient glory, it has been an object of interest and of veneration, not only to Scottish men and women but to wanderers from all the corners of the earth. The poets, the historians, and the novelists, have combined to make the apartments of the Queen of Scots perhaps the most interesting suite of rooms in Europe. There is the audience chamber, with its memories of distressing interviews with the fiery and uncompromising leaders of the Reformation; there is the dressing room of the lovely Queen, a little chamber whose decayed tapestry brings back in a touching way the melancholy tale of a life's EDINBURGH CASTLE FROM THE SOUTH-WEST. his own showing, was more fitted to preach repentance in the wilderness than to seek for converts under the shadow of the throne? Nothing but the unconditional surrender of soul and conscience would satisfy this erstwhile priest; and so little did he think of the regard and consideration which were due to his Queen that he could stand calmly at her feet unmoved by her tears and afterwards make a jest of her grief by telling of the number of handkerchiefs which his unmannerly language had called into use! Nor was it with religious matters only that he must needs interfere. A contem |