artial jail delivery, releasing hundreds of
prisoners in Scotland, Ireland and England, exempting only highway and
house robbers, murderers, and those who had committed overt acts of treason
against the crown.

Many political prisoners had been immured in the Tower and other state
prisons on trivial or trumped up charges, preferred by jealous courtiers on
personal or religious grounds.

James was very friendly to the dramatic profession, and granted a charter
to the Shakspere Company to play at the Blackfriars, Globe, Prince, Fortune
and Curtain theatres.

In the coronation procession nine of the "Kings Company" appeared dressed
out in fantastic array, wearing four yards and a half each of silk-scarlet
cloth.

The nine chief actors thus honored by the King were William Shakspere,
Augustine Phillips, Laurence Fletcher, John Hemmings, William Sley, Robert
Armin, Henry Condell, Richard Cowley and Richard Burbage.

King James sent for Shakspere and Burbage and told them to be ever in
readiness as the King's servants to perform at any of the palaces that he
might entertain domestic or foreign guests, and assured them that the
puritanical policy that had hounded them in the past should not prevail
during his reign, believing that the stage, properly managed, was as great
an educator for the people as the church.

When William told me of this interview with the King I expressed great
delight, with the other literary bohemians that now there sat on the throne
of old Albion, a patron of poetry, painting, music and sculpture.

The Church of Rome and the Church of England had been battling for nearly a
hundred years in Britain for the mastery; and although the devotees of
Luther's Reformation had cracked the creed of popes and princes, there was
a general demand for a new version and translation of the Bible, cutting
out the Catholicism of the old book and expurgating the vulgarity and
superstition engrafted on the "Word of God" by the apostles and bishops of
the first, second and third centuries, after Christ had been crucified for
the sins of all mankind.

Curious kind of celestial justice, to kill any man for my sins and crimes?
I prefer to suffer for my own sins and not fall back on a "scapegoat" to
carry them off into the wilderness.

On the first of September, 1604, a great religious conclave was held at
Hampton Court by the established church and the Puritans, and there it was
determined to make a new, revised and