rit and independence,
and compelled to look on at so much which he could not stop or remedy.
Thus passive and helpless, yet with the fiction of supremacy in his
name, we see the boy only by glimpses through the tumultuous crowd about
him with all their struggles for power, until suddenly he flashes forth
into the foreground, the chief figure in a scene more violent and
terrible still than any that had preceded it, taking up in his own
person the perpetual and unending struggle, and striking for himself the
decisive blow. There is no act so well known in James's life as that of
the second Douglas murder, which gives a sinister repetition, always
doubly impressive, to the previous tragedy. And yet between the two what
fluctuations of feeling, what changes of policy, how many long
exasperations, ineffectual pardons, convictions unwillingly formed, must
have been gone through. That he was both just and gentle we have every
possible proof, not only from the unanimous consent of the chronicles,
but from the manner in which, over and over again, he forgives and
condones the oft-repeated offences of his friend. And there could be few
more interesting psychological studies than to trace how, from the
sentiments of love and admiration he once entertained for Douglas, he
was wrought to such indignation and wrath as to yield to the weird
fascination of that precedent which must have been so burnt in upon his
childish memory, and to repeat the tragedy which within the recollection
of all men had marked the Castle of Edinburgh with so unfavourable a
stain.

We are still far from that, however, in the bright days when Douglas was
Lieutenant-Governor of the kingdom, and the men who had murdered his
kinsmen were making what struggle they could against his enmity, which
pursued them to the destruction of one family and the frequent hurt and
injury of the other. How Livingstone and his household escaped from time
to time but were finally brought to ruin, how Crichton wriggled back
into favour after every overthrow, sometimes besieged in his castle for
months together, sometimes entrusted with the highest and most
honourable missions, it would be vain to tell in detail. James would
seem to have yielded to the inspiration of his new prime minister for a
period of years, until his mind had fully developed, and he became
conscious, as his father had been, of the dangers which arose to the
common weal from the lawless sway of the great nobles,