has lieved, or at least made all Scotland believe, ¡ again denied of late years; so, indeed, -that Rizzio was Mary's paramour. Mr. Mary's guilt of any kind. It has been conFroude believes that he was not, on the sidered right, perhaps because it was necessound ground that no one can credit a word sary, to ignore even the one broad fact, worth which Darnley said on any matter. But the any dozen others, that within a few days of slander, if slander it was, did its work. It Darnley's death, Mary was honoring, caressjustified Rizzio's death in the eyes of the ing, playing garden games with the man who Scotch, who, years after, shouted to poor had indubitably murdered her husband, and, James, "Come out, thou son of Signor as the public were informed, abducted and Davie!" and gave occasion to at least one dishonored her. bitter jest that the said James was the Solomon of England in this at least, that he was the son of David. One cannot pity Rizzio. He played for all or nothing, and lost. One might have pitied him, if he had turned to bay valiantly at last. Fox as he was, he might at least have died like the fox-dumb and game, biting as long as two limbs are left together. But he did not. The upstart who, five minutes before, had been sitting at supper with the queen, while noble Scotchmen stood in waiting behind his chair, screamed with pain like a girl, clung to his mistress, then to her bed, and was dragged out howling for mercy, to die like the false cur that he was. "Here is his destiny," moralized an old porter, as he stood by, and saw his corpse flung on the chest in the lodge; " for on this chest was his first bed when he came to this place, and there now he lieth, a very niggard and misknown knave." It is, in fact, the belief in Rizzio's guilt with Mary which explains the extreme brutality of the conspirators to Mary herself. Mere political jealousy of her favorite would not have vented itself in gratuitous insults to her. They believed Darnley's story, and were, in so far, his dupes. It was this, perhaps, which enabled Mary so far to thrust aside her own feelings as to pardon them, that she might the more securely wreak her vengeance on him. Of her guilt with Bothwell, and her complicity in Darnley's murder, Mr. Froude's pages leave simply no doubt. He has made use of the famous "Casket-letters." But it is clear, from his own account, that they are no more needed to enable us to judge of her guilt than they were needed at the time. Scotland, England, and France, made up their minds at once, years before these letters were found, and we may, if needful, do the same. As to the letters themselves, their authenticity, as is well known, has been again and But," says Mr. Froude, "the so-called certainties of history are but varying probabilities; and when witnesses no longer survive to be cross-questioned, those readers and writers who judge of the truth by their emotions can believe what they please. To assert that documents were forged, or that witnesses were tampered with, costs them no effort; they are spared the trouble of reflec tion by the ready-made assurance of their feelings." "The story in the text," Mr. Froude says, in a note, "is taken from the depositions of Anderson and Pitcairn; from the deposition of Crawford in the Rolls' House; and from the celebrated Casket-letters of Mary Stuart to Bothwell." Out of these materials, Mr. Froude has constructed a story, which for clearness, pathos, and grace of style, will remain a κтnua èç dɛ, as one of the most perfect specimens of writing in the whole range of our literature. Of the letters, he says: "Their authenticity will be discussed in a future volume, in connection with their discovery, and with the examination of them which then took place: Meantime, I shall assume the genuineness of documents which, without turning history into a mere creation of imaginative sympathies, I do not feel at liberty to doubt. They come to us, after having passed the keenest scrutiny both in England and Scotland. The handwriting was found to resemble so exactly that of the queen, that the most accomplished expert could detect no difference. One of these letters could have been invented only by a genius equal to that of Shakspeare; and that one, once accomplished, would have been so overpoweringly sufficient for its purpose that no forger would have multiplied the chances of detection by adding the rest. The inquiry at the time appears, to me, to supersede authoritatively all later conjectures. The English Council, among whom were many friends of Mary Stuart, had the French originals before then, while we have only translations, or transla- | by mere sentimentality, but just as dangerous tions of translations." But even those, it seems to me, are enough. Read that one letter, of which Mr. Froude well says, "that it could have been invented only by the genius of a Shakspeare," and judge whether it could have been written by any human being save by a woman, "at that strange point where her criminal passion becomes almost virtue by its self-abandonment:" "I must go forward with my odious purpose. You make me dissemble so far that I abhor it. If it were not to obey you, I had rather die than do it. * "Have no evil opinion of me for this, for you yourself are the cause of it. For my own private revenge, I would not do it to him. Seeing, then, that to obey you, my dear love, I spare neither honor, conscience, hazard, nor greatness, I pray you take it in good part." as if they had been spread about by Father Parsons and the Jesuits themselves, for the express purpose of putting into the minds of men an entirely false view of the case. The sixteenth century Jesuits, however (with some show of sense, as from their point of view), spoke of Mary as a martyr, dying in defence of the Holy Roman faith: it was reserved for modern Protestants to broach the monstrous theory that she was sacrificed to the jealousy of Elizabeth. That notion might, indeed, have something tragic and terrible about it, false as it is, if it could only be proved that the two great queens were in love with the same man at the same moment, and fought Titanically for the prize. But as the favored personage required by that hypothesis has not yet been discovered in history, it remains that Elizabeth could have been jealous merely of Mary's superior beauty— and, indeed, one has seen the case actually so put, by some wieeacre who had probably never taken the trouble to consider what a deliberate and diabolical wickedness, extending over many years, he was imputing to the English queen. "Have no evil opinion of me for this." What man, villain enough to have forged letters in Mary's name, would have had also human sympathy, insight, genius enough to have forged that one sentence; to have thrown in that exquisite touch of mingled tenderness Certainly, if such people had wished to and shame; to have made Mary's highest ob- further the influence of the Romish Church ject, not the gratification of her own pleasure, over the public mind, they could have devised but Bothwell's good opinion; to have repre- no method of treating history better calculatsented her, and not him, as the suppliant and ed to do so, than to represent this long and the slave? One can imagine-because one internecine battle between Protestantism and knows the drama of those days-what sort of Popery as merely the private quarrel of two stuff a forger would have put into Mary's handsome and ambitious women. And, theremouth,-stuff worthy of a stage Semiramis or fore, it is necessary to repeat again and again, Messalina but instead, we find words such that Mary Queen of Scots was not merely as no man-perhaps not even Shakspeare- heir to the throne of England, but that she could invent or imagine, words which prove considered and declared herself the rightful their own authenticity, by their most fantas-queen thereof during the lifetime of Elizatic and unexpected, yet most simple and pa- beth. That she was the hope and mainstay thetic, adherence to human nature. Those of the Popish party, both in England and who doubt the terrible fact of Mary's having written that letter, must know as little of the laws of internal evidence as of the tricks of the human heart. It can be no pleasure to go into such matters, no pleasure to believe any woman an adulteress and a murderess. But as often as the relation of Elizabeth and Mary is brought before us, so often, at least for some years to come, will it be necessary to recollect clearly what it was. The whole matter, ever since Mr. Hume wrote his history, has been overlaid with misstatements, caused, probably, in Scotland, and the wily and unscrupulous foe of that Protestant cause which has been the strength and the glory of both countries alike. That for that very reason Elizabeth shrank from acknowledging her as her heir, because she knew (as Mr. Froude well shows) that to do so was to sign her own death-warrant; that she would have been shortly murdered by some of those fanatics, who were told by the pope and the Jesuits that her assassination was a sacred duty. That Mary, by her crimes, alienated from her, not her own subjects,-they had had too much reason to tory since the Conquest, and of Scotch history since the days of great John Knox, for what, thank Heaven, it is a perpetual rebellion against ultramontane tyranny; their outspoken contempt for all feelings and institutions which are most honored by English or by Scotch,-those, I say, who have observed this, will never lose an opportunity of reminding their fellow-countrymen, and especially the young, that they must, in justice to their native land, keep unstained and clear their broad sense of right and wrong; and remember that the cause which Elizabeth (with whatever inconsistencies and weaknesses) espoused, was the cause of freedom and of truth, which has led these realms to glory; the cause which Mary (with whatever excuses of early education) espoused, was the cause of tyranny and of lies, which would have led these realms to ruin; and that after all— Victrix Causa Diis placuit, et victa puellis. hate her already, but her Catholic friends in | those who have lately joined, or are inclined France, Spain, and England; and thus ena- to join, the Church of Rome; their dissatisbled Elizabeth to detain her in captivity as faction with the whole course of English histhe only security against one who was an open conspirator, and pretender to the throne during her life; and finally, on the discovery of fresh plots against her crown, and the liberties and religion of England, which had by then become identified with the Protestant cause, to bring her to the scaffold. The justice or injustice of that sentence will, no doubt, be discussed by Mr. Froude in a future volume, as ably and fairly as he has in these volumes discussed Mary's original guilt; and if he shall give his verdict against Queen Elizabeth, and therefore against the Lords and Commons of England, who concurred with her in the sentence, we are bound to listen patiently to his decision. No one can come clean-handed out of such a long and fearful struggle; and the party which are in the right are but too certain, ere their work is done, to have likened themselves more than once to the party which is in the wrong. But that Elizabeth and her party were in the right, and Mary and her party in the wrong, is to be remembered by every man who calls himself a Protestant; and any one who has observed the deep denationalization of mind now prevalent, not in the loyal, hereditary Catholics of these realms, but in What Mr. Froude will have to say on this subject, we shall wait patiently and hopefully to hear. But that he will take, in the main, the same view as has been taken in this last page, no one can doubt, who has read his already published volumes. C. K. FROM PIZARRO TO CONCHA.-The Spanish Chancery is a fair match for the English. We hear of games of chess bequeathed in Spain from sire to son, but the Spanish courts have just decided a lawsuit transmitted through eight generations. Two centuries and a half ago the inheritance of the conqueror of Peru fell into litigation together with that of his nearest kinsmen. The litigation has gone on till it fell to three persons to claim each one the whole of the Pizarro estates. One of these claimants is the Duchess de la Concelada, Marchioness of Douro and wife of the famous Captain-General of Cuba, Marshal Concha; another is a grandee, the Duke of Noblejas; and the third a lady, the Marchioness of La Conquista. The courts have divided the spoils. The wife of Marshal Concha received the inheritance of Pizarro himself, the slayer of the Inc is and spoiler of Peru; the Marchioness of La Conquista receives the entailed estate of Gonziles Pizarro; the Duke of Noblejas is bowed out of court, and the estate of Ferdinand Pizarro, brother of the conqueror, goes to the charitable establishments of Madrid. Letters of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy from 1833 to 1847. Translated by Lady Wallace. Longmans. WE are glad to welcome these delightful and characteristic letters in their English dress (already reviewed in our columns in the original German). The translation seems to be very faithful and conscientious. A few passages here and there struck us as obscure or imperfect; but on comparing them with the original, the imperfections proved in almost every case to be in Mendelssohn himself, who appears to have been conscious of this defect, if we may judge from a letter to his father on page 76. The book is well got up, and is prefixed by a fine steel engraving from a likeness of Mendelssohn taken after death by Hensel,-a beautiful portrait, which brings the noble and somewhat careworn face before us with touching reality.-Spectator. From The Watchman and Reflector. BY MRS. HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. THE revolution through which the American nation is passing is not a mere local convulsion. It is a war for a principle which concerns all mankind. It is THE war for the rights of the working classes of mankind, as against the usurpation of privileged aristocracies. You can make nothing else of it. That is the reason why, like a shaft of light in the judgment-day, it has gone through all nations, dividing to the right and the left the multitudes. For us and our cause, all the common working classes of Europe-all that toil and sweat and are oppressed. Against us, all privileged classes, nobles, princes, bankers, and great manufacturers, and all who live at ease. A silent instinct, piercing to the dividing of soul and spirit, joints and marrow, has gone through the earth, and sent every soul with instinctive certainty where it belongs. The poor laborers of Birmingham and Manchester, the poor silk weavers of Lyons, to whom our conflict has been present starvation and lingering death, have stood bravely for us. No sophistries could blind or deceive them; they knew that our cause, was their cause, and they have suffered their part heroically, as if fighting by our side, because they knew that our victory was to be their victory. On the other side, all aristocrats and holders of exclusive privileges have felt the instinct of opposition, and the sympathy with a struggling aristocracy, for they, too, feel that our victory will be their doom. This great contest has visibly been held in the hands of Almighty God, and is a fulfilment of the solemn prophecies with which the Bible is sown thick as stars, that he would spare the soul of the needy, and judge the cause of the poor. It was he who chose the instrument for this work, and he chose him with a visible reference to the rights and interests of the great majority of mankind, for which he stands. Abraham Lincoln is in the strictest sense a man of the working classes. All his advantages and abilities are those of a man of the working classes; all his disadvantages and disabilities are those of a man of the working classes; and his position now at the head of one of the most powerful nations of the earth, is a sign to all who live by labor that | their day is coming. Lincoln was born to the inheritance of hard work as truly as the poorest laborer's son that digs in our fields. At seven years of age he was set to work, axe in hand, to clear up a farm in a Western forest. Until he was seventeen his life was that of a simple farm laborer, with only such intervals of schooling as farm laborers get. Probably the school instruction of his whole life would not amount to more than one year. At nineteen he made a trip to New Orleans as a hired hand on a flat boat, and on his return he split the rails for a log cabin and built it, and enclosed ten acres of land with a rail fence of his own handiwork. The next year he hired himself for twelve dollars a month to build a flat boat and take her to New Orleans; and any one who knows what the life of a Mississippi boatman was in those days, must know that it involved every kind of labor. In 1832, in the Black Hawk Indian War, the hardy boatmán volunteered to fight for his country, and was unanimously clected a captain, and served with honor for a season in frontier military life. After this, while serving as a postmaster, he began his law studies, borrowing the law books he was too poor to buy, and studying by the light of his evening fire. He acquired a name in the country about as a man of resources and shrewdness; he was one that people looked to for counsel in exigencies, and to whom they were ready to depute almost any enterprise which needed skill and energy. surveyor of Sangamon County being driven with work, came to him to take the survey of a tract off from his hands. True, he had never studied surveying-but what of that? He accepted the "job," procured a chain, a treatise on surveying, and did the work. Do we not see in this a parable of the wider wilderness which in later years he has undertaken to survey and fit for human habitation without chart or surveyor's chain? The In 1836 our backwoodsman, flat-boat hand, captain, surveyor, obtained a license to practise law, and, as might be expected, rose rapidly. His honesty, shrewdness, energy, and keen practical insight into men and things soon made him the most influential man in his State. He became the reputed leader of the Whig party, and canvassed the State as stump speaker in time of Henry Clay, and in 1846 was elected representative to Congress. Here he met the grinding of the great ques- for himself, called on to conduct the passage tion of the day-the upper and nether mill- of a great people through a crisis involving stone of slavery and freedom revolving against the destinies of the whole world. The eyes each other. Lincoln's whole nature inclined of princes, nobles, aristocrats, of dukes, earls, him to be a harmonizer of conflicting parties scholars, statesmen, warriors, all turned on rather than a committed combatant on either the plain backwoodsman, with his simple side. He was firmly and from principle an sense, his imperturbable simplicity, his deenemy to slavery-but the ground he occu- termined relf-reliance, his impracticable and pied in Congress was in some respects a mid- incorruptible honesty, as he sat amid the dle one between the advance guard of the war of conflicting elements, with unpretendanti-slavery and the spears of the fire-eaters. ing steadiness, striving to guide the national He voted with John Quincy Adams for the ship through a channel at whose perils the receipt of anti-slavery petitions; he voted world's oldest statesmen stood aghast. The with Giddings for a committee of inquiry into brilliant courts of Europe levelled their operathe constitutionality of slavery in the District glasses at the phenomenon. Fair ladies saw of Columbia, and the expediency of abolish- that he had horny hands and disdained white ing slavery in that District; he voted for the gloves. Dapper diplomatists were shocked various resolutions prohibiting slavery in the at his system of etiquette; but old statesmen, territories to be acquired from Mexico, and who knew the terrors of that passage, were he voted forty-two times for the Wilmot wiser than court ladies and dandy diplomaProviso. In Jan. 16, 1849, he offered a plan tists, and watched him with a fearful curiosfor abolishing slavery in the District of Co- ity, simply asking, "Will that awkward old lumbia, by compensation from the national backwoodsman really get that ship through? treasury, with the consent of a majority of If he does, it will be time for us to look the citizens. He opposed the annexation of about us." Texas, but voted for the bill to pay the expenses of the war. Sooth to say, our own politicians were somewhat shocked with his state-papers at But at the time of the repeal of the Mis- first. Why not let us make them a little souri Compromise he took the field, heart and more conventional, and file them to a classisoul, against the plot to betray our territories cal pattern? "No," was his reply, "I shall to slavery. It was mainly owing to his ex-write them myself. The people will understand ertions that at this critical period a Republi- them." "But this or that form of expression can Senator was elected from Illinois, when a is not elegant, not classical." "The people Republican Senator in the trembling national will understand it," has been his invariable scales, of the conflict was worth a thousand reply. And whatever may be said of his times his weight in gold. state-papers, as compared with the classic Little did the Convention that nominated standards, it has been a fact that they have Abraham Lincoln for President know what always been wonderfully well understood by they were doing. Little did the honest, the people, and that since the time of Washfatherly, patriotic man, who stood in his ington, the state-papers of no President have simplicity on the platform at Springfield, ask- more controlled the popular mind. And one ing the prayers of his townsmen and receiv- reason for this is, that they have been inforing their pledges to remember him, foresee mal and undiplomatic. They have more rehow awfully he was to neod those prayers, sembled a father's talks to his children than the prayers of all this nation, and the prayers a state-paper. And they have had that relof all the working, suffering common people ish and smack of the soil, that appeal to the throughout the world. God's hand was upon simple human heart and head, which is a him with a visible protection, saving first greater power in writing than the most artfrom the danger of assassination at Baltimore ful devices of rhetoric. Lincoln might well and bringing him safely to our national cap- say with the apostle, "But though I be rude ital. Then the world has seen and wondered in speech yet not in knowledge, but we have at the greatest sign and marvel of our day, to wit; a plain working man of the people, with no more culture, instruction, or education than any such working man may obtain been thoroughly made manifest among you in all things." His rejection of what is called fine writing was as deliberate as St. Paul's, and for the same reason-because he felt that |