centious language or manners. It is well known that James the
First had a habit of swearing,--expletives in conversation, which, in
truth, only expressed the warmth of his feelings; but in that age, when
Puritanism had already possessed half the nation, an oath was considered
as nothing short of blasphemy. Henry once made a keen allusion to this
verbal frailty of his father's; for when he was told that some hawks
were to be sent to him, but it was thought that the king would intercept
some of them, he replied, "He may do as he pleases, for he shall not be
put to the oath for the matter." The king once asking him what were the
best verses he had learned in the first book of Virgil, Henry answered,
"These:--

'Rex erat AEneas nobis, quo justior alter
Nec pietate fuit, nec bello major et armis.'"

Such are a few of the puerile anecdotes of a prince who died in early
youth, gleaned from a contemporary manuscript, by an eye and ear
witness. They are trifles, but trifles consecrated by his name. They are
genuine; and the philosopher knows how to value the indications of a
great and heroic character. There are among them some which may occasion
an inattentive reader to forget that they are all the speeches and the
actions of a child!

THE DIARY OF A MASTER OF THE CEREMONIES.

Of court-etiquette few are acquainted with the mysteries, and still
fewer have lost themselves in its labyrinth of forms. Whence its origin?
Perhaps from those grave and courtly Italians, who, in their petty
pompous courts, made the whole business of their effeminate days consist
in _punctilios_; and, wanting realities to keep themselves alive,
affected the mere shadows of life and action, in a world of these
mockeries of state. It suited well the genius of a people who boasted of
elementary works to teach how affronts were to be given, and how to be
taken; and who had some reason to pride themselves in producing the
Cortegiano of Castiglione, and the Galateo of Della Casa. They carried
this refining temper into the most trivial circumstances, when a court
was to be the theatre, and monarchs and their representatives the
actors. Precedence, and other honorary discriminations, establish the
useful distinctions of ranks, and of individuals; but their minuter
court forms, subtilised by Italian conceits, with an erudition of
precedents, and a logic of nice distinctions, imparted a mock dignity
of science to the solemn fopperies of a master