268 Statements concerning Sir Walter Scott. 



Of his conversation with Sir Walter, Lord Benholme 

 remembered their talking of Queen Mary, and Sir Walter 

 saying that he thought the ride to the Hermitage was the 

 thing most against her. 



If his whole history was not made up of the oddest 

 contradictions, it would be almost incredible that Sir Walter 

 should have attended the Jedburgh assizes, for some five- 

 and-thirty years, without discovering that Mary had sat 

 through them (though nobody was hanged on that occasion) 

 between Bothwell's being wounded and her going to the 

 Hermitage Castle ; her visit to which was of an official 

 character, it being a royal fortress. 



The feature of the most opposite characteristics is strongly 

 put by the living critic, whose opinion is perhaps the best 

 worth having (when, to use an expression of his own, one 

 agrees with it.) "Shirley" says there is the strongest 

 evidence against Sir Walter Scott's being the author of 

 Waverley. That is, of course, circumstantial evidence. In 

 fact there is something in this, for it does explain incident- 

 ally how the Waverley secret came to be kept at all. 



To return to his view of Queen Mary, Lord Benholme's 

 recollection is fully borne out by an examination of the two 

 histories of Scotland he wrote in his latter years. In the 

 " Tales of a Grandfather," the ride to the Hermitage is 

 given as in the narrative which was issued for political 

 purposes (it is to be remembered that Moray, who accom- 

 panied Mary, was also the witness in the Chastelard case) 

 while in the history written for Lardner's Cyclopaedia the 

 facts are correctly given. 



There is one case in which Lockhart's general absence of 

 precision seems to have misled those very careful writers, 

 Myers and Gurney ; that is, they take one of his rounded 

 phrases as a statement of fact. (See Phantasms of the Living ; 

 Auditory Cases, Note.) 



He gives the letter in full, written from the court at 

 Selkirk, in which Sir Walter complains of, and wonders at, 

 the noise which had gone on in the half-finished rooms 

 at Abbotsford, on two successive nights ; and part of the 

 subsequent one, in which he remarks on its coincidence 

 as to time with the death of George Bullock, a London 

 decorator, who fitted up the public rooms at Abbotsford, 



