and knowledge of mankind. It is especially worth
noticing how he considers virtue and religion to be immediately
connected with knowledge--the confusions in the world appear to him
for the most part to arise from mediocrity of knowledge[382]--and how
highly moreover he estimates a sense for truth. He finds the most
material difference between virtue and vice in the greater inward
truthfulness of the former. King James delivers many other
well-weighed principles of calm wisdom: it is only extraordinary how
little his own practice corresponded with them.[383] When in one of
his earlier writings we mark the seriousness with which he speaks of
the duty incumbent on a king of testing men of talent, of measuring
their capacity, and of appointing his servants not according to
inclination but according to merit, we should expect to find him in
this respect a careful and conscientious ruler. Instead of this we
find that he always has favourites, whose merits no one can discover;
to whom he stands in the extraordinarily compound relation of father,
teacher, and friend, and to whom he allows a share in the power which
he possesses. He could never free himself from a ruinous prodigality
towards those about him, in spite of resolutions of amendment. How
soon were the costly objects flung away which Elizabeth had collected
and left behind at her death![384] How many possessions or sources of
revenue accruing to the crown did he allow to pass into private hands!
Any regulation of his household expenditure was as little to be
expected from him in England as in Scotland. Like the princes of the
thirteenth century he considered that the royal power assigned him
privileges and advantages in which he had a full right to allow his
favourites and servants to share. Not seldom the most scandalous
abuses were connected with these: for instance, when the court was to
be provided with the common necessaries of life during its journeys,
it was required that they should be delivered to it at low prices: the
servants exacted more supplies than were wanted, and then sold the
surplus for their own profit. In grotesque contrast with the
disgraceful cupidity of his attendants is the exaggerated conception
which James had formed for himself of the ideal importance of the
royal authority, which at that time some persons attempted with
metaphysical acuteness to lay down almost in the same terms as the
attributes of the Deity. He had similar notions about h