Page:Penelope's Progress.djvu/27

13 Perhaps it was the weather, but I could think of nothing but poor Queen Mary! She had drifted into my imagination with the haar, so that I could fancy her homesick gaze across the water as she murmured, "Adieu, ma chère France! Je ne vous verray jamais plus!"—could fancy her saying as in Allan Cunningham's verse:— The sun rises bright in France, And fair sets he; But he hath tint the blithe blink he had In my ain countree."

And then I recalled Mary's first good-night in Edinburgh: that "serenade of 500 rascals with vile fiddles and rebecks;" that singing, "in bad accord," of Protestant psalms by the wet crowd beneath the palace windows, while the fires on Arthur's Seat shot flickering gleams of welcome through the dreary fog. What a lullaby for poor Mary, half Frenchwoman and all Papist!

It is but just to remember the "indefatigable and undissuadable" John Knox's statement, "the melody lyked her weill and she willed the same to be continewed some nightis after." For my part, however, I distrust John Knox's musical feeling, and incline sympathetically to the Sieur de Brantôme's account, with its "vile fiddles" and "discordant psalms," although his judgment was doubtless a good deal depressed by what he called the si grand brouillard that so dampened the spirits of Mary's French retinue.