his head, as he
happened to toss it on. He used to loll on the necks of his favourite
courtiers, and slobber their faces, and kiss and pinch their cheeks; and
the greatest favourite he ever had, used to sign himself in his letters
to his royal master, His Majesty's 'dog and slave,' and used to address
his majesty as 'his Sowship.' His majesty was the worst rider ever seen,
and thought himself the best. He was one of the most impertinent talkers
(in the broadest Scotch) ever heard, and boasted of being unanswerable in
all manner of argument. He wrote some of the most wearisome treatises
ever read--among others, a book upon witchcraft, in which he was a devout
believer--and thought himself a prodigy of authorship. He thought, and
wrote, and said, that a king had a right to make and unmake what laws he
pleased, and ought to be accountable to nobody on earth. This is the
plain, true character of the personage whom the greatest men about the
court praised and flattered to that degree, that I doubt if there be
anything much more shameful in the annals of human nature.

He came to the English throne with great ease. The miseries of a
disputed succession had been felt so long, and so dreadfully, that he was
proclaimed within a few hours of Elizabeth's death, and was accepted by
the nation, even without being asked to give any pledge that he would
govern well, or that he would redress crying grievances. He took a month
to come from Edinburgh to London; and, by way of exercising his new
power, hanged a pickpocket on the journey without any trial, and knighted
everybody he could lay hold of. He made two hundred knights before he
got to his palace in London, and seven hundred before he had been in it
three months. He also shovelled sixty-two new peers into the House of
Lords--and there was a pretty large sprinkling of Scotchmen among them,
you may believe.

His Sowship's prime Minister, CECIL (for I cannot do better than call his
majesty what his favourite called him), was the enemy of Sir Walter
Raleigh, and also of Sir Walter's political friend, LORD COBHAM; and his
Sowship's first trouble was a plot originated by these two, and entered
into by some others, with the old object of seizing the King and keeping
him in imprisonment until he should change his ministers. There were
Catholic priests in the plot, and there were Puritan noblemen too; for,
although the Catholics and Puritans were strongly opposed to each other,