behaviour, and
speeches."[95] It was at the earnest desire of Lord and Lady Lumley that
the writer of these anecdotes drew up this relation. The manuscript is
without date; but as Lord Lumley died in April, 1609, and leaving no
heir, his library was then purchased for the prince, Henry could not
have reached his fifteenth year; this manuscript was evidently composed
earlier: so that the _latest_ anecdotes could not have occurred beyond
his thirteenth or fourteenth year,--a time of life when few children can
furnish a curious miscellany about themselves.

The writer set down every little circumstance he considered worth
noticing, as it occurred. I shall attempt a sort of arrangement of the
most interesting, to show, by an unity of the facts, the characteristic
touches of the mind and dispositions of the princely boy.

Prince Henry in his childhood rarely wept, and endured pain without a
groan. When a boy wrestled with him in earnest, and threw him, he was
not "seen to whine or weep at the hurt." His sense of justice was early;
for when his playmate the little Earl of Mar ill-treated one of his
pages, Henry reproved his puerile friend: "I love you because you are my
lord's son and my cousin; but, if you be not better conditioned, I will
love such an one better," naming the child that had complained of him.

The first time he went to the town of Stirling, to meet the king,
observing without the gate of the town a stack of corn, it fancifully
struck him with the shape of the top he used to play with, and the child
exclaimed, "That's a good top." "Why do you not then play with it?" he
was answered. "Set you it up for me, and I will play with it." This is
just the fancy which we might expect in a lively child, with a
shrewdness in the retort above its years.

His martial character was perpetually discovering itself. When asked
what instrument he liked best, he answered, "a trumpet." We are told
that none could dance with more grace, but that he never delighted in
dancing; while he performed his heroical exercises with pride and
delight, more particularly when before the king, the constable of
Castile, and other ambassadors. He was instructed by his master to
handle and toss the pike, to march and hold himself in an affected style
of stateliness, according to the martinets of those days; but he soon
rejected such petty and artificial fashions; yet to show that this
dislike arose from no want of skill in a trifling accompli