in the matter it is difficult to
make out, on the next. Thus James settled summarily the question between
himself and his kinsmen. The house of Albany ended upon the scaffold,
and however just their doom might have been, there was something
appalling in this swift and sweeping revenge, carried out rigorously
without a sign of hesitation by a young king, a happy bridegroom, an
accomplished and gay cavalier.

It must indeed be allowed, notwithstanding his poetry and his evident
love of everything that was lovely and of good report, that the reign of
the first James was a stern one. Every witness agrees as to his
accomplishment, and that he was the flower of knighthood, of splendour
and courtesy, the most chivalrous, the most daring, the most graceful
and gracious of all his Court: and his genius as a poet is even more
generally acknowledged. The King's "Quhair" as a poem is quite capable
of standing on its own merits, and needs no additional prestige as the
performance of a king. Had he been but a wandering minstrel Chaucer
would have had no need to be ashamed of his pupil. It is full of
delightful descriptions of nature and love and youth: the fresh morning
as it rises upon the castled heights, the singing of the birds and
fluttering of the leaves, the impulse of a young heart even in the
languor of imprisonment to start up and meet the sun, with all the
springs of new life which at that verdant season come with every new
day--the apparition of the beautiful one suddenly appearing in the old
immemorial garden with all its flowers, herself the sweetest and the
fairest of flowers, all are set before us, with a harmony and music not
to be excelled. The young Prince chafing at his imprisonment, dreaming
of all the fantastic wonderful things he might do were he free, yet
still so full of irrepressible hope that his impatience and his longings
are but another form of pleasure, takes shape and identity as distinct
as if he had been one of the figures in that famous pilgrimage to
Canterbury, which had been part of his training in this delightful art.
If James had never reigned at all he would still have lived through all
these centuries in the guise in which he stood at his window on that May
morning, and suddenly, amid his youthful dreams, beheld the lovely
vision of the Lady Jane emerging from under the young spring verdure of
the trees. There is a certain window not generally supposed to be that
at which the royal captive sto