MARY STUART.
A true magnet, with a remarkable variation was Mary Stuart, about whose character historians have been wrangling for nearly three hundred years. The Marian controversy is not more nearly settled at this hour than when the head of Scotland's queen fell at Fotheringay Castle. The trouble seems to be that nobody takes her magnetism sufficiently to account. She, was neither an angel, as her defenders wish to. prove, nor a devil, as her traducers declare, but a mixture of both (this is the human composition—veritably feminine) far from a woman who was perfect, and yet a perfect woman. The disposition is to judge her as a subject—the subject of her ardent temperament and wandering desires. Unlike most of her sex, she understood herself better than -she was understood. She frequently said she was too much a woman to be a queen; but her blundering adherents w.ere resolved she should be tormented with a crown. No princess has been more unfortunate; and ncr misfortunes sprang from setting her in a frame of history, instead of a frame to display her as a beautiful and brilliant woman. 111-starred in her parentage, the place and time of _ her nativity, when she had once quitted misty and dreary Scotland for France, where her soul was born, she never should have been seduced from the land of vines. Her forebodings, after her widowhood, on returning to Scotland, were not less prophetic than gloomy. : No marvel she longed for the luxurious court, elegantly divided between love and letters. What pit, for her, that Catharine di Medicis was the serpent in that Parisian Eden! Her sad sweet song of farewell shows that she left in France the joy of her heart and the kindness of her destiny. In Scotland her troubles began immediately. She a sincere Romanist in the midst of a Protestantism as narrow and intolerant as the creed it opposed. She was a Latin, hot a Pict; a Guise, not a Stuart. Her vivacity, freedom, and love of pleasure offended and shocked the Scotch reformers, who earnestly believed that flowers of enjoyment could only skirt the gulf of perdition. Everybody but herself selected husbands for her. She was privileged to marry any man except him she preferred. Darnley was finally accepted, partly to avoid further badgering, but mainly because she was opposed. (A woman with a warm bias for Apollo would wed Vulcan, if any persistent effort were made to prevent it. The myth that he was Aphrodite's husband is mirrored in tellural truth. Below Olympus, the goddesses of love and beauty are continually joined with animalism and deformity.) , Mary soon wearied of Darnley, whose handsome face could not cover his want of brain and character. She transferred her active and plastic affections,to Eizzio, and her lord, disapproving her disloyalty, formed a conspiracy against the Italian, who was cowardly murdered. A woman never forgives her husband for killing her lover, however lenient she may, be when the victim is marital. The incensed queen quickly dried" the tears the assassination had evoked, in order to meditate revenge. Apparently reconciled to Darnley, the house in which he lay ill was blown up (connubial blowings-up a*© generally figurative), while his spouse was attending a masquerade. He was not missed; for Bothwell for some time supplied his place, and Bothwell was the precursor of others. It was Mary's fortune to be loved j it, was her misfortune to love. Hardly aray man except John Knox (a bronze inuage is quite as susceptible as he was, in the highest emotional state) ever approached her without a flush of erotic fever. She was entirely magnetic; she gave out sparks like an electric machine .-,. and every spark kindled a flame. She herself had wonderful amorous versatility. She could exchange a dead husband for a living lover with perfect equanimity. She could forget Ronsard with Francis, and Francis with Ronsard. A sentimental shuttlecock, she rebounded from one masculine battledore to another, e£ch time with a new spring, swinging as g ae passed, from concussion to car.p" d j' She was as liable to fasc.; n .^L' „- . ne ,/.• , •■ -illation us sub was certain to fascinate-. Her ma gnetism, was her unpropitioi^ planet . If % he had not been lovably would not have been hated. It w; ag &c peril of her eyes that bore her t6 tUe blo(jk< Had za b e th be / en beautiful, and she homely, she have been safe from the axe. But to be a charming woman, in the view of the regnant Tudor, was a capital offence. Poor Mary went right nobly to her death. Was she comforted and sustained in her final hour by the hope of meeting in heaven a fair proportion of the many men she had loved on earth ?—Galaxy.
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Thames Star, Volume VII, Issue 1965, 22 April 1875, Page 4
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797MARY STUART. Thames Star, Volume VII, Issue 1965, 22 April 1875, Page 4
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