Scotland and its royal house of Stuart have the distinction of giving to the world the two most romantic figures in Scottish history-Mary Queen of Scots and her hapless descendant, Prince Charles Edward Stuart, Mary Stuart, indeed, is the most appealing and most. fascinating figure in the world's history since her Greek prototype, Helen of Troy. Her enigmatic and unique career has formed the theme of dramas or novels in all the principal Janguages of Europe. There is Echiller's " Maria Stuart," Scott's "The Monastery" and " The Abbot," Swinburne's Bothwell," and Maurice Hewlett's "The Queen's Quair.""
It has been left to the United States, however, to exploit the cinematograph possibilities Mary's passionate and chequered career. A staff of scenario writers and technical experts is leaving America to arrange for "locations" and exterior settings in what promises to be the most elaborate film yet produced. The enterprise ing gentleman who has the scheme in hand, Mr. William Fox, has concluded that a physical replica of Mary Stuart must exist somewhere in Scotland, and he is inviting applications from ladies who think they answer to this description.
If the suggestion of contemporary portraits and literary references has been faithfully followed, the successful candidate will not be of the dark, conventionally semi-Italianate type; she will approximate rather to the blonde Madonnas of the Lomband painters, Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa answers fairly closely to one's mental picture of Marie Stuart. If the film as a story is to make any appeal to close students of the period, it will have to depart very considerably from the conventional sentiment of the average American film, and from the American ideal of a heroine as an insipid and passionless being whose life could be related in the form of a Sunday school story. Mary Stuart is the myriad-minded type of womanhood, and Swinburne's notion of her may have been as partial as Frank Harris's of Shakespeare. But Swinburne's essay on Mary Stuart is the most convincing psychological interpretation of the facts of her life that has yet appeared, and one is reasonably safe in saying that the success of the film version will depend largely upon the degree io which it has conformed to Swinbumian interpretation.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.