Henderson might have quoted the full and rather critical description
of the child by her maternal grandmother. In essentials it serves for her looks till, about 1582, she became fat and "flat-faced with a double chin," as Wingfield describes her on her dying day. " She could hardly be termed pretty," writes Mr. Henderson, "and her portraits do not indicate a beauty or comeliness sufficient to justify the contemporary eulogies." It is too clear from his illustrations that Mr. Henderson has not lavished his critical powers on Mary's iconography. Though her features and complexion were good, Mary's beauty lay in hex' charm ; and of charm the Court painters of the school of Clonet, dit Janet, and Jehan de Court, could scarcely ever convey even a hint. Mary, like all her fair contemporaries, is traduced by artists, who painted in a wooden manner, in the absence of the sitter, from hasty crayon sketches. Could Reynolds, Gainsborough, or Romney have painted her, we should understand the history of the Queen. As matters stand, the wax medallion of the Breslau Museum suggests her youthful and queenly grace ; the miniature in white in a Dutch museum renders her charm; and the portraits in the collections of the Earl of Leven and Melville and the Earl of Morton give, the former the magic of her smile, the latter the stately and scornful melancholy of Elizabeth's captive. Unluckily all these portraits, like Mr. Douglas Freshfield's beautiful recent acquisition, are very little known to any but specialists. Mr. Henderson makes amends for the remark that Mary "could hardly be termed pretty" (p. 71) by celebrating " the bright freshness of her early womanhood, tall, stately, and sur- passingly fair," on her bridal day. We prefer his second
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