The only excuse that can be advanced for the pro duction of a new book on Mary Stuart is that her supremely interesting personality has so frequently led her historians into the by-path of inquiry as to her virtue or vice, as to have obscured, to some extent, the reasons for her disastrous political failure which, as it seems to me, did not spring from her goodness or badness as a woman, but from certain human weaknesses of character, quite compatible with general goodness and wisdom or with the reverse, but which fatally handicapped her as against antagonists who are less subject to such weakness.