their witness. Archbishop Spotswood, in his history, doubts whether he should even mention so improbable a story-regarding it "as a very fiction; and a mere invention of the man's own brains," and it seems to have been regarded as one of those diseased confessions into which men are sometimes tempted by an appetite for notoriety, like the acknowledgments of Satanic compacts so often made by unhappy women who died the victims of their vanity.*

Spotswood's rejection of Sprot will justify ours; and once more, therefore, we fall back on the barren narrative; there, if any where, to find the truth. The present writer is not so unwise as to suppose that he can explain a mystery with which contemporaries were perplexed, to whom the persons of the actors and a thousand other circumstances now lost for ever were familiarly known; nor will he waste the reader's time with unprofitable guesses which will lead him nowhere. It will be something, however, if we can separate with distinctness what is obscure from what is certain; and looked at carefully, the story will be found to yield, if not its full secret, yet some conclusions on which we may rest.

If we run over in our minds the outline of the events of the 5th of August, the chief difficulties will be seen to be two:

First-why did James consent to accompany Alexander Ruthven, without attendants, into a secluded part of Gowrie's house? And second-why was Andrew Henderson placed in the study?

We know, from James's word, that some bitter secret existed between himself and the Ruthvens; he said that he had matter against them to take their lives if he pleased to do it. And when he was once in those lonely galleries, with the doors locked behind him, sudden panic may have led to expressions of distrust, and distrust have led to anger; and when the hot words had once found vent, the remaining tragedy might have followed with the greater case the less it was premeditated. But what took him into the gallery at all? We will not affront the king's understanding with believing that he was enticed by a pot of gold. The many lies which he certainly told entitle us to disregard his mere word; and, after making all allowance for his necessities and his avarice, we feel that in this point the general scepticism was just. We must reject the story, in the form at least in which it was related by himself. It was not this, but some

*Spotswood's History, p. 509. The archbishop was present at Sprot's trial, and also witnessed his death. He made no secret of his incredulity even at the time. "A little before the execution, Mr. John Spotswood, bishop of Glasgow, said to Mr. Patrick Galloway, 'I am afraid this man will make us all ashamed.' Mr. Patrick answered, 'Let alone, my lord; I shall warrant him; and, indeed, he had the most part of the speech to him on the scaffold." Calderwood, vi. p. 780.

thing far different from this, of which Alexander Ruthven spoke to him after his hurried ride from Falkland; and the real business which tempted him was something which he was either ashamed, or, for some other reason, did not venture to confess.

All the circumstances unite to force this conclusion upon us. There already existed some secret, we must repeat again and again, to which both brothers were a party. It has occurred to us that this secret may have been connected with Gowrie's reputation as a magician. The room to which James was taken was Gowrie's cabinet. Ruthven may have offered to show him either the philosopher's stone, or the elixir vitæ, or the inscription on the seal of Solomon-some mystic absurdity, or some natural discovery supposed to be mystic, some experiment in which Henderson's assistance may have been required. Something of this kind may easily have excited James's curiosity; while the tremors and sense of guilt with which the dabbling in these occult matters must have been accompanied would have kept him silent afterwards, and at the time might have agitated him into panic.

Either this it may have been, or one of a thousand other possibilities. But when they crossed the hall there can, we think, have been no intention, on Ruthven's part, of any act of violence. He may have had questions to ask the king; he may have had expostulations in secret to make to him; but assuming (as we are satisfied that we may assume) the scene in the study to have been accurately described, we are forced to look on it as an unpremeditated accident. We are forced to suppose that a quarrel took place in the suite of rooms between the hall-staircase and the study-door, when Henderson first became a witness of the interview. We do not know how long they were in these rooms, or what took place in them; but we observe that, whereas James says that on entering the study he asked if Henderson was the man whom he was brought to see, Henderson himself heard the king use no such words at all; he describes Ruthven's attack as instantaneous, as if it was the consequence of something else immediately antecedent. What, then, was this? A gleam of light is thrown upon it by a passage in a letter of Sir Henry Neville, Lord Gowrie's friend, to Sir Ralph Linwood. Neville was likely to have informed himself carefully on a matter which affected him so nearly. And if he has touched the right clue, we can understand readily why we have so little information on so serious a catastrophe; and why (which otherwise would be inexplicable) the wiser statesmen of both kingdoms have left us no record of their opinions.

Neville's words are these: "Out of Scotland we hear that there is no good agreement, but rather an open dissidence, between the king and his wife; and many are of opinion that the

U

discovery of some affection between her and the Earl of Gowrie's brother, who was killed with him, was the truest cause and motive of that tragedy."

Mr. James has done his best to bring this hint into discredit by the exaggerated use which he has made of it; and it was perhaps nothing more than a contemporary conjecture. If a guess, however, it was one of those happy guesses which explain difficulties without involving us in extravagance, and enable us to see how events may have happened without straining the ordinary probabilities of human action. James was jealous of the queen, as the best evidence shows, without just cause. Murray had fallen a victim to his suspicions, and the queen had been slandered. Let us suppose him similarly jealous of young Ruthven, and the subject to have risen between them in these rooms. Ruthven, devoted, not dishonourably, to his mistress, may have spoken freely, as he naturally would speak to a prince whom he despised. The angry words may have leapt to and fro; James, as he never failed to do in his uncourteous insolence, may have touched some delicate and sensitive point of feeling; then, in turn, Ruthven's passion may have brought up before him the injuries of his house; and in a moment of anger he may have seen in the caitiff prince who was quaking before him, not a king of Scotland, but a mere miserable human wretch, whose longer life the world could well dispense with.

This is, of course, nothing more than a suggestion of the manner in which the catastrophe may have been caused; yet other probabilities point in the same direction. In the two years which followed, the Ruthven family were the occasion of a standing feud between James and the queen. We find accounts of secret interviews between the latter and the two younger brothers of the Earl of Gowrie, who escaped to England. In 1603 Beatrice Ruthven, who had been sent away from court, was secretly brought into the palace at midnight, and state-secrets of grave importance communicated to her: the queen and the Ruthvens formed a party on one side, and James on the other. Such incidents are slight in themselves, but they are indicative of a tissue of circumstances underneath the texture which was presented to the world. The genuine picture was painted over with a poor daub, and only here and there the original forms and colours become visible.

Finally, Sir Henry Neville's conjecture will explain what otherwise it is hard to account for,-Elizabeth's outward acquiescence in James's story. Gowrie was as near of kin to her as James himself; and the interest which she exhibited in the exiled family, if it does not disprove her belief in the guilt of Gowrie and his brother, was held to show at the time that she gave but

dubious credit to it. But she probably felt that an investigation might compromise important interests; that the secure succession of the Scotch prince was the only visible means by which the union of the kingdoms could be effected; and that it was better not to press an inquiry which might exhibit James in a light too contemptible to be endured. We may satisfy ourselves, perhaps, that she acquitted him of intentional crime. His folly, miserable as it seemed, was not too great for England to bear in consideration of the benefits which he would bring with him.

ART. II.-CRIME IN ENGLAND, AND ITS TREATMENT. Nineteenth Report of the Inspectors appointed to visit the different Prisons of Great Britain, presented to both Houses of Parliament by command of Her Majesty. London, 1856.

Reports of the Directors of Convict Prisons for the Year 1855, presented to both Houses of Parliament by command of Her Majesty. London, 1856.

England and Wales: Tables showing the Number of Criminal Offenders for the Year 1854, presented to both Houses of Parliament by command of Her Majesty. London, 1855.

Crime: its Amount, Causes, and Remedies. By Frederic Hill, Barrister-at-law, late Inspector of Prisons. London, 1853.

Crime in England: its Relation, Character, and Extent, as developed from 1801 to 1848. By Thomas Plint. London, 1851. Reformatory Schools for the Children of the Perishing and Dangerous Classes, and for Juvenile Offenders. By Mary Carpenter. London, 1851.

On the Principles of Criminal Law. London, 1846.

Ir is difficult to say whether the excess or the absence of partyfeeling is the greater evil. Suffering under the latter, we may be apt to exaggerate its disadvantages. They are forced upon our attention. But we ought not to overlook whatever counterbalancing good, or (if this phrase be demurred to) partial compensations, may accompany them.

Among these, not the least is the following: that men's minds, set free from the more exciting, though not more important topics of political controversy, have leisure to deal with those great social problems which, while our eyes have been turned in another direction, have assumed such a vast magnitude, and so threatening a character. How to promote and secure the physical health of the people; to increase their means of intellectual training; to establish on a happier foundation the relations of the employer

and the employed; to diminish pauperism, and turn pauperlabour to the best account;-these are matters, the successful treatment of which is felt to be the proper business of the highest statesmanship. The attention devoted to them, and to kindred subjects, by such men as Lord John Russell, Lord Stanley, and Sir John Pakington, is one of the most hopeful signs of the times. It seems to give promise of the solution of some at least of the difficulties that surround them. Men who have been trained in the habits, or who live in the expectation of office, generally avoid taking up questions till the time for dealing with them practically is at hand. The executive character of their minds, which fits them for the work of government, and which is confirmed by familiarity with it, keeps them aloof, by a kind of instinct, from matters as yet wholly indeterminate.

Of all the social problems which can engage a nation, at once the most urgent and the most difficult is that which the word CRIME suggests. Others involve, comparatively speaking, mere matters of convenience. This is, or may become, a question of life and death. The Sphynx proposes her riddle; we must discover it, and annihilate her, or ourselves perish. Society exists only by obedience to law, and crime is the defiance and violation of law. It is impossible, however, to grapple effectively with it till we know its real character and extent. Statistical returns, the reports of prison-inspectors and gaol-chaplains, and, what is almost more valuable, the personal testimony of those-the Howards and Mrs. Frys of our own day-who have gone down into the dark hiding-places of sin to seek and save them that were lost, have given us, it is true, much valuable information, which the most wicked indifference of an earlier period, and its inferior organisation for purposes of inquiry, had hitherto withheld. But much still remains unknown which it is essential to know. The experience of philanthropists is necessarily limited-confined to a few individual cases. Inadequacy characterises also official returns and reports. Crime and detected crime are not yet convertible terms. Government statistics, therefore, present us with a part of the case only. We cannot hope that it will ever be otherwise. But there can be no doubt that, however deficient such returns may and must be, they do approximate much more closely to a faithful representation of the total delinquencies of the kingdom than at any previous period. The percentage of acquittals to committals is yearly diminishing, notwithstanding the greater advantages allowed to prisoners for purposes of defence. Many circumstances have conspired to this result. Our policearrangements are better; the old watchmen, who, so far from affording protection to others, only earned it for themselves by their decrepitude, have vanished; the character of the judicial