The Portland daily press. [volume] (Portland, Me.) 1862-1921, 1882-02-14
Notes on the Character of Mary
O11eau of Scots,

lAlgernon G. Swinburne in Fortnightly Review]
OF the convent in which Mary Stuart had
passed her novitiate the Lady Superior was
Queen Catherine de Medici. The virgins who
shared the vigils of her maidenhood or bright
ened the celebration of her nuptials were such
as composed the Queen-mother's famous fly
ing squadron of high-born harlots, profession
ally employed in the task of making the wor-
ship of Venus Pandemos subserve the pur-
poses of Catholic faith or polity, and OCCASION
ally as on the feast of st. Bartholomew, ex-
hilarate6 by such diversions as the jocose ex-
animation of naked and newly murdered
corpses with an eye to the satisfaction of a Gu
riosity which the secular pen of modern his
torian must decline to explain with the frank
ness of clerical contemporary. The cloistral
precinct which sheltered her girlhood from
such knowledge of evil as might in after days
have been of some protection to her guileless
leyity was the circuit of court whose pursuits
and recreatioDs were divided between the al
coves of Sodom and the playground of Acel-
dana. What were the vices OF the society de-
scribed by Brantome it is impossible or at
least it would be repulsive, to suggest by SO
much as hint; but its virtues were homicide
and adultery. Knox and Ascham would have
given palmer and juster expression IN shorter
terms of speech more purely English, to the
fact that no man was honored who could not
show blood on his hands, no woman admired
who would not boast as loudly of the favcrs
she had granted as her gallants of the favors
they had received. 1t is but slight matter to
add that the girl who was reared from her very
infancy in this atmosphere-in the atmosphere
of palace which it would be tiattery to call
brothel or slaughter-house-hadf for her moth
er woman of the blood-stained house OF Guise,
and for her father the gaberlunzie-man or jolly
beggar of numberless and nameless traditional
adventures in promiscuous erotic intrigue
The question of family is, of course, very FAR
from conclusive, though certainly it may help
"to thicken other proofs that do demonstrate
thinly'' The calendar of saints includes
Borgia, or, to put it perhaps more forcibly, the
house of Borgia contains a saint. And some
writers-Landor among them, who had little
love for the brood-haye averred that the
Bonaparte family did once produce an honest
man and equitable ruler-Lonis, King OF Hol-
land, whose only son gave his life in vain for
Italy. 1t would certainly have been no greater
miracle than these, no more startling excep-
ton to the general rule, that the daughter OF
James V. and Mary of Guise should have been
a biameless though imbecie creature, an inno-
cent in the least fattering sense of the word,
whose blood was very snow-broth and whose
brain very feather. But mere innocenc5, as
distinguished from the absolute idiocy which
even n6f WafmeSJ ADMIRERS WOulu hesitate 10
ascribe to her, will hardly suffice to explain
her course of conduct in the most critical peri
cd of her life. A woman who could play the
part assigned to Mary by the Whitakers,
Stricklands and Hosscks, whose laudations
have SO cruelty libeled her, must have been
either the veriest imbecile whose craven folly
ever betrayed in every action an innate and
irresponsible impotence of mind. or at least
and at best good girl of timid temper and
weak intellect, who had been tenderly shell
tered all her life from any possible knowledge
or understanding of evil, from all apprehension
as from all experience of wickedness and
wrong. Now it is of course, just barely posi-
BILE that a girl might come innocent as Shakes
peare's Marina even out of such house of en-
tertainment as that kept by the last Prin-
ces of the race of Valos; but it is absolutely
and glaripgly impossible that she should come
forth from it ignorant of evil. And it is not a
iot less impossible that an innocent woman
who was not annually idiotic or angeically ig-
noraEt, driveling craven or thing enskied
and sainted, the pitifullest or the purest, the
most thick-witted or the most unspotted, of her
kind, could have borne herself as did Mary
after the murder of her caitif husband.