the letter-book but recently dug out of a
mass of State papers; in the pages of De La Moor, [Note 1], the only
chronicler of his deeds who did not hate him, and who, as his personal
attendant, must have known more of him in a month than the monks could
have learned in a century; and last, not least, in that touching Latin
poem in which, during the sad captivity which preceded his sadder death,
he poured out his soul to God, the only Friend whom he had left in all
the universe.

"Oh, who that heard how once they praised my name,
Could think that from those tongues these slanders came?
... I see Thy rod, and, Lord, I am content.
Weave Thou my life until the web is spun;
Chide me, O Father, till Thy will be done:
Thy child no longer murmurs to obey;
He only sorrows o'er the past delay.
Lost is my realm; yet I shall not repine,
If, after all, I win but that of Thine."

[See Note 2.]

To a character such as this, the loss of his chief friend and only
reliable intercessor, when just emerging from infancy into boyhood, was
a loss for which nothing could atone. It proved itself so in those
dreary after-years of perpetual misunderstandings and severities on the
part of his father, who set him no good example, and yet looked on the
son whose tastes were purer than his own as an instance of irredeemable
depravity. The easiest thing in the world to do is one against which
God has denounced a woe--to put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter.

Another item of sorrowful news reached London with the coffin of Queen
Leonor. It was the death of the baby Queen of Scotland, by whose
betrothal to Prince Edward the King had vainly hoped to fuse the
northern and southern kingdoms into one. It left Scotland in a
condition of utter distraction, with no less than eleven different
claimants for the Crown, setting up claims good, bad, and indifferent;
but every one of them persuaded that all the others had not an inch of
ground to stand on, and that he was the sole true and rightful
inheritor.

The only claimants who really had a shadow of right may be reduced to
three. If the old primitive custom of Scotland was to be regarded--a
custom dear to all Celtic nations--by which illegitimate children were
considered to have an equal right to the succession with the legitimate
ones, then there could be no question that the heir was Patrick de
Galithlys, son of Henry, the natural son of Alexander the Second. But
if