domontade, his want of personal dignity, his
buffoonery, his coarseness of speech, his pedantry, his personal
cowardice. Under this ridiculous exterior indeed lay no small amount of
moral courage and of intellectual ability. James was a ripe scholar,
with a considerable fund of shrewdness, of mother-wit, and ready
repartee. His canny humour lights up the political and theological
controversies of the time with quaint incisive phrases, with puns and
epigrams and touches of irony which still retain their savour. His
reading, especially in theological matters, was extensive; and he was
already a voluminous author on subjects which ranged from predestination
to tobacco. But his shrewdness and learning only left him, in the phrase
of Henry the Fourth of France, "the wisest fool in Christendom." He had
in fact the temper of a pedant, a pedant's conceit, a pedant's love of
theories, and a pedant's inability to bring his theories into any
relation with actual facts. It was this fatal defect that marred his
political abilities. As a statesman he had shown no little capacity in
his smaller realm; his cool humour and good temper had held even
Melville at bay; he had known how to wait and how to strike; and his
patience and boldness had been rewarded with a fair success. He had
studied foreign affairs as busily as he had studied Scotch affairs; and
of the temper and plans of foreign courts he probably possessed a
greater knowledge than any Englishman save Robert Cecil. But what he
never possessed, and what he never could gain, was any sort of knowledge
of England or Englishmen. He came to his new home a Scotchman, a
foreigner, strange to the life, the thoughts, the traditions of the
English people. And he remained strange to them to the last. A younger
man might have insensibly imbibed the temper of the men about him. A man
of genius would have flung himself into the new world of thought and
feeling and made it his own. But James was neither young nor a man of
genius. He was already in middle age when he crossed the Border; and his
cleverness and his conceit alike blinded him to the need of any
adjustment of his conclusions or his prejudices to the facts which
fronted him.

[Sidenote: The foreign rule.]

It was this estrangement from the world of thought and feeling about
them which gave its peculiar colour to the rule of the Stuarts. It was
not the first time that England had submitted to foreign kings. But it
was the first time