162 SCOTLAND ILLUSTRATED. 



Certain officers of the court received the cargo of sweetmeats in crystal vessels, 

 curiously painted vi'ith gold and azure, and representing various fishes. While 

 the mimic ship was unlading, Arion, sitting upon the prow, shaped like the 

 fabled dolphin, struck his harp, at which hautboys, violins, and flutes continued to 

 join, till the music deepened into a full concert. When the banquet had ended, 

 thanksgiving was pronounced by the bishop or chaplain; then the 139th Psalm 

 was sung, in seven parts, by fourteen voices ; and finally, at the sound of 

 Triton's sheU and the pilot's whistle, the ship weighed anchor, and made sail, 

 till she had got outside the hall. Such was the concluding scene of this brilliant, 

 but strange mixture of christian devotion and pagan pantomime. The hull of 

 the vessel is still preserved in the chapel, now the armoury of the fortress. It 

 is impossible, on perusal of this gorgeous but whimsical ceremony, not to observe 

 the painful contrast it offers to that which accompanied the monarch himself, 

 when his ill-fated mother presented him at the same altar. 



It was on the 11th of December, 1566, that Mary arrived in Stirling to 

 arrange the ceremony, and to encourage, by her presence, the pomp and 

 circumstance which were to attend the baptism of her infant son, born on 

 the 19th June previous. Darnley had already preceded her; and ambassadors 

 from England, France, Savoy, and Piedmont, were in waiting, to present the 

 congratulations of their several courts. Cardinal Laurea, the Pope's nuncio, 

 was also to have been of this number, and had already set out on his way 

 to the Scottish court ; but the queen, fully aware of the danger to which 

 the public tranquillity might have been exposed, had the minister of his Holiness 

 appeared at a crisis of so much religious excitement, found means to evade 

 the reception, and the cardinal proceeded no further north than Paris. 



The preparations for this solemn pageant* were concerted by Mary with 

 a splendour which rather alarmed than gratified the minds of her Protestant 

 subjects, and was much more in accordance with the gorgeous shows in the 

 palace of the Tuileries, than with the grave sobriety which now characterised 

 the Protestant ritual. The Earl of Bedford, who arrived in Stirling with 

 a splendid retinue on the part of Queen Elizabeth, presented a font of gold 

 in her name, and enhanced the ofiering by a jocular message, that the font, 

 having been ordered by his mistress on the first announcement of the Prince's 

 birth in June, might now be too small for so thriving a child ; but if so, he 

 added, by way of compliment, it might be reserved for the next scion from 



• The excessive expenses nnrt superfluous apparel, says Knox, which were prepared at that time, far 

 exceeded all that ever had been devised or set forth in this country. 



