Messrs. Seeley and Co. send us Aunt Judith's Recollections; a Tale of the Eighteenth Century. By the author of 'Missionary Recollections.' Aunt Judith flourished in the days of Wesley and Whitfield, and in a pleasant chatty way, though somewhat garrulous withal, the old lady tells her young niece Annie the story of those times—of the darkness which had settled on this England of ours, and of the great awakening that followed the labours of those holy, earnest men.—Hetty's Resolve; a Story of School Life. By the Author of 'Under the Lime Trees.' There is but little power or point in these rather prosy details of school routine; but if they should lead some young readers to shun the slippery ways of Florence Benson, and to imitate the honest work of the kind-hearted Maggie, they will not have been written in vain.—Curious Facts about Animals. For Little People. Evening Amusement. Two little books for little folk, simply written and attractively illustrated; the former describing the habits of the mole, the badger, the otter, the deer, the dog, the sheep, the horse, &c., and telling anecdotes respecting them; the latter a series of juvenile stories of the simplest kind, which derive their main interest from the children cutting out figures in black paper to illustrate them.—Tony and Puss. From the French of P. J. Stahl. With Twenty-four Illustrations from designs by Lorenz Frölich. Another dainty book for very little children, with multitudinous groupings of Tony and Puss in varied relationship. Some of the illustrations are very clever, though Herr Frölich's typical 'Papa' looks rather of the feeble order; but he may not be less welcome to the Tinies, for whose special advantage Messrs. Seeley and Co. cater so lavishly.—Sunday Echoes in Weekday Homes. By Mrs. Carey Brock. This book is a history of the home life of some young people, who having been trained to look upon the Bible as connected with every thought and incident of their lives, find in the journeyings of the children of Israel types and emblems of their own doings and trials, at home and at school. It is none the less interesting to the class for whom it is written, if less true to Nature, that the children themselves suggest the warnings given and the lessons taught by God's dealings with the Israelites. From the 'passing over Jordan' of the youngest of the family the rest derive much comfort in seeing one of their number enter the 'promised land.'

Messrs. Cassell cater liberally and successfully for young readers. The Log of the Fortuna: a Cruise on Chinese Waters. Containing Tales of Adventure in Foreign Climes, by Sea and by Shore. By Captain Augustus F. Lindley. A Collection of 'Seven Sailors' Yarns'—not all of them, however, relating to China. The scene of one of them is laid in Paris; of another, among Australian Bushrangers; of another, in the Sea of Azof. The 'Yarns' are told on board the Fortuna, which has got upon a mud-bank in Chinese waters, and waits for spring tides. Captain Lindley wields a vigorous, incisive, and humorous pen. His stories are therefore clever and amusing: some of his descriptions and bits of rollicking humour would not discredit Charles Lever. The book is profusely illustrated, and, like all the publications of this firm, marvellously cheap.—Home Chat with our Youngsters. By C. L. Mateaux. Never was instruction more acceptably given or more sweetly sugared than in this attractive volume. The twenty-two chapters on 'People, and things which the Young Folks see or hear about,' are illustrated on almost every page. The chapters are conversational in form, the young folks asking only sufficient questions to mask the monotony of unbroken information. The story of 'Columbus' is thus told, and is made lucid by illustrations. Simpler synonyms for some of the words might have been found, but the book will be a great favourite in the nursery. It is, for children a stage farther advanced, almost as good as 'The Children's Album.' We can give it no higher praise.

From the Religious Tract Society we have received—Spanish Pictures Drawn with Pen and Pencil. By the Author of 'Swiss Pictures Drawn with Pen and Pencil.' We have done—what doubtless some of our readers have done—tested the 'Swiss Pictures' by taking it to Switzerland as a quasi guide-book. We found it carefully accurate, and full of intelligent observations. This bespeaks our confidence for this companion volume about Spain. 'Africa begins at the Pyrenees,' says the French proverb: so does our author: and even veteran travellers will feel that once over the Pyrenees they are in a terra incognita. And yet few lands are physically more unique, romantically more full of wild legends, historically more full of romance, ethnologically more interesting, and socially and religiously more full of undeveloped possibilities. Madrid, the Escurial, Granada, Seville, &c., are visited and described. Cathedrals, bull-fights, gipsies, Murillo, religious customs, literature, trade, the Moors, all receive due notice; and have thrown upon them gleams of history, snatches of poetry, and visions of the future. The author has freely laid under contribution writers of renown, large extracts from whom are interwoven with his narrative of personal experience. Gustave Doré is among the eminent artists who have supplied the illustrations. It is an instructive and effective popular book.—The Picture Gallery of the Nations is a series of short descriptive chapters of about seventy of the nations of the earth; each occupying only a page or two, and illustrated with very effective wood-cuts, some of them whole-page size, others smaller. It is a popular book of the best kind for young people who delight in the help which the eye affords to the instruction of the pen.—Original Fables. By Mrs. Prosser. Readers of 'The Leisure Hour' and 'The Sunday at Home' are familiar with Mrs. Prosser's name as the writer of two or three capital serial stories which appeared in these publications. With these fables they will, through the same medium, have made acquaintance. To write fables successfully has been given to only three or four of the human race—the author of those which pass under the name of Æsop, La Fontaine, and Kriloff are the only three names of great fable-writers that occur to us. Mrs. Gatty very successfully attempts parabolic stories, but not the terseness and brevity of the fable proper, which is to fiction what the sonnet is to poetry—what the proverb is to the sermon. Mrs. Prosser has done fairly where so few have done well. From the nature of the case we cannot quote (to analyze would carry us beyond our space); we content ourselves therefore with a general commendation. The morals which she weaves into fables may catch the fancy of children, whom an apothegm would only make callous.—The Leisure Hour and the Sunday at Home are sustained at a degree of almost unrivalled adaptation and efficiency. Tale, biography, sermon, and song, often of a very high order, diversify and enrich their pages. We are glad to see in the 'Leisure Hour' the wise breadth and impartiality which supplies biographers of characters so diversified as those of Miss Burdett Coutts, Charles Dickens, Père Hyacinthe, Professor Huxley, Mr. Disraeli, and General Trochu. Mr. Lord, Naturalist to the Egyptian Exploring Expedition, supplies a valuable series of papers on the 'Peninsula of Sinai.'—Cousin Mabel's Experiences. By E. Jane Whately. Cousin Mabel having been absent from England for some years, in visiting various home circles is much struck by the diversified errors and follies into which religious people have fallen, whose earnestness and seriousness cannot be doubted. The ritualism of young ladies run wild upon church decorations, the spiritual gossip in which certain elderly people indulge, the doing for the poor and strangers to the neglect of home duties, the party spirit pervading missionary work, with other forms of worldliness and selfishness, which are so largely mixed up with many forms of religious life—all these grave errors are exemplified in a series of unconnected stories of family life. Miss Whately does not exaggerate in her characters the follies she wishes to point out; and her way of combating them is one of much wisdom, and is combined with many practical hints, calculated to effect in actual life the reforms which in these tales is always achieved. We trust the practical result may be the same.—The First Heroes of the Cross. By Benjamin Clarke. Sunday School Union. Mr. Clarke's 'Life of Jesus, for Young People,' has been received with so much favour that he has attempted to tell the story of the Acts of the Apostles in the same way. He has done this admirably, with great simplicity, and in a very interesting way. Mr. Clarke has spared no pains to qualify himself for forming and expressing true conceptions of the incidents that he narrates.

THE
BRITISH QUARTERLY
APRIL 1871

Art. I.—Burton's History of Scotland. Vols. V., VI., and VII. London. 1870.

The affairs of Scotland will always occupy an honourable and conspicuous place in the grand drama of national development which makes up the history of the British Empire. It has been the destiny of the Scottish people to influence the general fortunes of England in a larger degree, and more permanently, than could have been expected from their mere numbers, or their position in the north of our island. In the years which succeeded the Norman Conquest, Scotland was, in some measure, a place of refuge for the English name from foreign oppression; and though deeply penetrated by the Norman elements which consolidated and strengthened her feudal monarchy, she held up something like a beacon of hope before the eyes of the down-trodden Saxon, during the calamitous period of alien domination. Two centuries later, when her nationality had become more firmly established, when her Highland clans, her Anglo-Norman colonies, her Norse settlements, and her Lowland commonalty had been brought nominally under a supreme government, though not yet formed into one people, she exhibited to the world a magnificent spectacle of prolonged, stubborn, and successful resistance to the encroachments of a very superior power; and, in the internecine struggle which ensued, we see distinctly the high qualities which have made her the worthy compeer of England. It was probably one of the results of this contest that France, aided by her Northern ally, was enabled to throw off the Plantagenet yoke, and to acquire the position she still holds in Europe; and, but for Verneuil and other battles, it is possible that, in the fifteenth century, England might have become a military despotism, extending from the Western Isles to the Pyrenees, and have had a completely different history. It is unnecessary to say what Scotland accomplished at the great crisis of the Reformation; if, in the person of Mary Stuart, her dynasty threatened England with subjection and with the despotism of the Catholic League, her people proved the defence of Protestantism, rejected the sovereign they justly detested, gave strength to the counsels of Elizabeth, and contributed largely to the success of the policy which culminated in the ruin of the Armada. For it was at the momentous period of the civil wars of the seventeenth century that the house of Stuart and part of the Scottish nobility endeavoured to blight the prospects of England, to stifle freedom by military power, and to restore what was Romanism all but in name; but the mass of the nation opposed the movement, and set the noble example of resistance to it; and though they ultimately separated from England, they did much to cause the series of events which ended in the Revolution of 1688. Scotland, in a word, has had a beneficent influence of a marked and even extraordinary kind in shaping the course of our English story; and we need not notice how her independent spirit has affected for good the national character, what eminent men she has given the State, what valuable additions she has made to the treasures of British literature and thought, what use some of her institutions have been, as patterns for our own imitation.

The author of the interesting volumes before us has long held a distinguished name in connection with the literature of his country. He has given us an exceedingly good account of the transitional period in the history of Scotland, which embraces the Revolution of 1688, the Union, and the final extinction of the reactionary and half-Romanist party in the nation, when Jacobitism perished in 1745. He has also described with clear insight, and, on the whole, with an impartial pen, that honourable episode in Scottish annals, of lasting importance to these kingdoms, the 'ancient league' of Scotland with France; and no writer, perhaps, has done more to elucidate whatever is most noteworthy in the antiquarian remains and monuments of the races which from the earliest times have inhabited the northern division of our island. The history, however, which he has just completed, and which deals with the affairs of Scotland from the Roman invasion, under Agricola, to the overthrow of the House of Stuart, is, beyond comparison, his greatest work; and as a repository of the learning with which modern research and criticism have explored the national life of his countrymen, it stands alone, and without a parallel. Mr. Burton, in his first four volumes, which were published in 1867, carried down his narrative from the legendary period of the Roman occupation, of the Scots and Picts, of Fergus and the old Celtic monarchy, to the rise of the feudal kingdom of Scotland and its long contest with the power of England; and he went on to describe the memorable era when the ascendancy of France, and national pride resenting Flodden and Pinkie Cleugh, struggled with the forces of the Scottish Reformation; and Mary Stuart, but for her crimes and her fall, would probably have united the two crowns, and become the sovereign of a Romanized Britain. If in treating this important part of his subject Mr. Burton was sometimes carried away by a somewhat too exuberant patriotism, if he, perhaps, assigned too high a place to the position of Scotland in British annals, and if he was never eloquent or picturesque, he displayed rare and extensive knowledge, a judgment usually calm and correct, and the faculty of forming sound conclusions; and his account of the Scottish war of independence, and of Scottish politics in the sixteenth century, is worthy of very high commendation. His last three volumes, which have recently appeared, and which we purpose now to review, comprise the last years of the reign of Mary Stuart, the triumph of the Reformation in Scotland, the struggle between the Kirk and the Crown, which marked the beginning of the seventeenth century, the reaction against James I. and his son, and the memorable events which were the result; they proceed to describe the great civil war, the important attitude of Scotland in it, the conquest of the kingdom by Cromwell, and the dreary epoch which followed the Restoration; and, as may be supposed, they exhibit the merits and the shortcomings of the earlier volumes. Mr. Burton is inclined to exaggerate the part which Scotland played in 1640-1649: he is rather too lenient to the Stuart kings, and he is not skilful in the art of composition. But, on the other hand, his learning is profound; his views of most of the great questions which arose during this memorable epoch, are sound and judicious, and deserve attention; and, on the whole, he has placed the events of the drama of which he has followed the chequered scenes, in their true light and real significance.

Mr. Burton's narrative begins at the period of the imprisonment of Mary Stuart at Lochleven. A few months previously the Scottish queen had been the hope of the Catholic Powers, which were ever planning the ruin of Elizabeth, and the overthrow of the Reformation in England; and, widely as they were divided from each other, they looked upon her as the appointed instrument with which to assail the common enemy. Her beauty too, her extraordinary gifts, the magic of her presence, and her rare abilities, had won the hearts of the Scottish nobility; and though she had never deceived Knox and the earnest champions of Scottish Protestantism, the pride of the nation was aroused in her favour, from the circumstance that it seemed probable that the two crowns would unite on her brow, and that she would become the sovereign of England and Scotland. Distrusted as she was in England by all the real friends of the Reformation, she was supported by the Catholic party, still most formidable in rank and numbers; and she had on her side the conservative feeling, of extraordinary strength in that age, which saw in her the heir to the throne, Elizabeth being without children, and the means of bringing England once more into the old order and ways of Europe. Had Mary Stuart not disgraced herself in the opinion even of that generation, not over-scrupulous about the acts of princes, there can be little doubt that she would have been acknowledged as Elizabeth's successor; and very probably she would have brought the reign of the heretic Tudor to a close, would have become the ruler of England and Scotland, arrested the Reformation for a time, and changed the whole tenor of our history. Providentially, however, this was not to be; and Mary Stuart, by her own hand, was to destroy the prospect of power and ambition, fraught with destruction to the destinies of mankind, which fortune seemed to have opened to her. The murder of Darnley, followed by the shameless and infamous marriage with Bothwell, revealed the depths of recklessness and crime in the existence of this singular woman, and placed her at once under the moral ban of Scotland, England, and Catholic Europe. At Carberry Hill her followers' arms dropped, as it were, from their nerveless hands; the nation rose in fury against her; her adherents were for the time silenced; and she found herself on a sudden a prisoner, her son proclaimed, the Reformation victorious, and Murray exercising the powers of a regent; the whole scene changing as if by magic. Catherine de Medicis, also, gave her up, alarmed at the storm which had burst out in Scotland; and though undoubtedly the Florentine queen was not guided by moral considerations, and, at this moment was beginning to adopt a conciliatory policy towards the French Huguenots, her complete abandonment of Mary Stuart was caused chiefly by a true conviction that she had ruined herself in general opinion. Philip II. also declined to give the slightest countenance to the beautiful fury, in whom he had hoped to find a St. Teresa; and in Catholic and Conservative England the revulsion of feeling was so strong, that thenceforward the cause of Mary Stuart ceased to be national in any real sense.

Sir Walter Scott and Mr. Froude have given us very different accounts of the captivity of Mary Stuart at Lochleven. Mr. Burton has taken great pains to ascertain the facts, and to judge of them, and we quote a few words from his description:—