ince, in a
melancholy fit, they were recalled to recollection after an interval of
three years; the verses are lost to us, with the letter which contained
them.]

James, even by the confession of his bitter satirist, Francis Osborne,
"dedicated rainy weather to his standish, and fair to his hounds." His
life had the uniformity of a student's; but the regulated life of a
learned monarch must have weighed down the gay and dissipated with the
deadliest monotony. Hence one of these courtiers declared that, if he were
to awake after a sleep of seven years' continuance, he would undertake to
enumerate the whole of his Majesty's occupations, and every dish that had
been placed on the table during the interval. But this courtier was not
aware that the monotony which the king occasioned him was not so much in
the king himself as in his own volatile spirit.

The table of James I. was a trial of wits, says a more learned courtier,
who often partook of these prolonged conversations: those genial and
convivial conferences were the recreations of the king, and the means
often of advancing those whose talents had then an opportunity of
discovering themselves. A life so constant in its pursuits was to have
been expected from the temper of him who, at the view of the Bodleian
library, exclaimed, "Were I not a king, I would be an university man; and
if it were so that I must be a prisoner, I would have no other prison than
this library, and be _chained together_ with all these goodly authors."[A]

[Footnote A: In this well-known exclamation of James I., a witty allusion
has been probably overlooked. The king had in his mind the then prevalent
custom of securing books by fastening them to the shelves by _chains_ long
enough to reach to the reading-desks under them.]

Study, indeed, became one of the businesses of life with our contemplative
monarch; and so zealous was James to form his future successor, that he
even seriously engaged in the education of both his sons. James I. offers
the singular spectacle of a father who was at once a preceptor and a
monarch: it was in this spirit the king composed his "Basilicon Doron; or,
His Majesty's Instructions to his dearest Son Henry the Prince," a work of
which something more than the intention is great; and he directed the
studies of the unfortunate Charles. That both these princes were no common
pupils may be fairly attributed to the king himself. Never did the
character of a young prince s