76 RIZZIO.
enjoyed the sweetest society in his only wife, Nicholas Murray, daughter of the Baron of Abercairney, who died in eighteen months after her marriage."
The grave of Rizzio is pointed out under one of the passages to a piazza, covered with a flat stone. Over the mantel-piece of the narrow closet, where from his last fatal supper he was torn forth by the conspirators, is a portrait said to be of him. Its authenticity is exceedingly doubtful ; yet it has been honored by one of the beautiful effusions of Mrs. Hemans, written dur ing her visit to Holyrood, in 1829.
" They haunt me still, those calm, pure, holy eyes ! Their piercing sweetness wanders through my dreams ; The soul of music, that within them lies, Comes o er my soul in soft and sudden gleams ; Life, spirit, life immortal and divine Is there, and yet how dark a death was thine."
In the gallery at Holyrood, which is 150 feet long, and plain even to meanness, are the portraits of one hundred and eleven Scottish monarchs, the greater part of which must, of course, be creations of fancy. Some of the more distinguished chieftains are interspersed with them. In the line of the Stuarts, we remarked the smallness and delicacy of the hands, which histori ans have mentioned as a marked feature of that unfor tunate house. The only female among this formidable assemblage of crowned heads, is Mary of Scotland. This, her ancestral palace, teems with her relics ; and, however questionable is the identity of some of them,
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