clumsy yet
genial gambols of the village festival. It is one of the most curious
and least to be expected transformations of poetic versatility--for it
is even amazing how he could know the life into which he thus plunged
joyous, as if he had been familiar with it from his childhood. King
James was not without an object amid all the laughter and the pranks of
his holiday. The King's cheerful ridicule of the clumsy fellows who
could not draw the bow was intended, with a prick of scorn under the
laughter, to rouse up his rustic lieges to emulation, not to be behind
the southern pock-puddings whose deadly arrows were, in every encounter
between Scots and English, the chief danger to the fighting men of the
north. It is curious that this difference should have existed and
continued with such obstinacy through all these fighting centuries; the
Scotch spearmen were all but invulnerable in their steady square, like a
rock, but they had little defence against the cloth-yard shafts of the
English bowmen, which neither exhortation nor ridicule, neither prizes
to win nor disaster to fear, could teach them to adopt. James laboured
hard, in ways more practical than his poems, to introduce this new arm,
but in vain. It was kept up languidly in holiday contentions, like that
of Christis Kirk on the Green, while his life lasted; but when his reign
was over and the momentary stimulus withdrawn the bows were all thrown
away.

The King's command of this humorous vein, so dear to his people, with
its trenchant sketches from the life and somewhat rough jests, is
wonderful, when his courtly breeding and long separation even from such
knowledge of rustic existence as a prince is likely to obtain is
considered. And the many-sided nature which made these humours so
familiar and easy to him is a strange discovery in the midst of all the
tragic circumstances of his life and reign. The union of the most
delicate poetry and romance with that genial whim and fancy is unusual
enough: but it is still more unusual to find the stern Justiciar,
avenger of blood and redresser of wrong, the reconstructer of a
distracted country, capable not only of the broad fun of the rustic
ballad-maker, but of so tolerant and humorous a view of the humble
commons, the underlying masses upon which society is built. For the
first aspect of affairs in Scotland could not be a cheerful one:
although it was rather with the nobles and gentlemen, the great
proprietors of the c