his affairs, not without occasional tumults on the Border, but with
no serious fighting anywhere for a course of pleasant years. The old
traditional strife between the King and the nobles no longer tore the
kingdom asunder. Perhaps the first great event of his life, the waking
up of his boyish conscience to find himself in the camp of a faction
pitted against his own father, influenced him throughout everything, and
made the duty of conciliation and union seem the first and most
necessary; perhaps it was but the natural revulsion from those methods
which his father had adopted to his hurt and downfall; or perhaps
James's chivalrous temper, his love of magnificence and gaiety, made him
feel doubly the advantage of courtiers who should be great nobles and
his peers, not dependants made splendid by his bounty. At all events the
King lived as no Stewart had yet lived, surrounded by all without
exception who were most noble in the land, encouraging them to vie with
him in splendour, in noble exercises and pastimes, and almost, it may be
imagined--with a change of method, working by good example and genial
comradeship what his predecessors had vainly tried to do by fire and
sword--tempting them to emulate him also in preserving internal peace
and a certain reign of justice throughout the country. There was no lack
of barons in the Court of James. Angus and Home and Huntly, who had
pursued his father to the death and placed himself upon the throne, were
not turned into subservient courtiers by his gallantry and charm: but
neither was there any one of these proud lords in the ascendant, or any
withdrawn and sullen in his castle, taking no share in what was going
on. The machinery of the State worked as it had never done before. There
were few Parliaments, and not very much law-making. Enough laws had been
made under his predecessors, "if they had but been kept," to form an
ideal nation; the thing to do now was to charm, to persuade, to lead
both populace and nobility into respecting them. It would be vain to
imagine that this high purpose was always in James's mind, or that his
splendour and gaieties were part of a plan for the better regulation of
the kingdom. But that he was not without a wise policy in following his
own character and impulses, and that the spontaneous good-fellowship and
sympathy which his frank, genial, and easy nature called forth
everywhere were not of admirable effect in the welding together of the
nation,