ttle against all the impulses which were pushing
him forward to his doom. He promised a fleet to his lady in France for
her aid--a fleet foolishly if not treacherously handled by Arran, and
altogether diverted from its intended end; finally, that having failed,
James flung away all precaution and yielded to the tide of many
influences which was carrying him away.

It is needless to tell over again the tale that everybody knows: how
both heaven and hell were stirred by this ill-omened undertaking; how an
aged saint, venerable and stately, suddenly appeared out of the crowd
when the King was at his prayers in the Cathedral of Linlithgow, with a
message from on high; and how when James had gone back to Holyrood, the
High Street of Edinburgh resounded in the dead of night with trumpet
note and herald's call from the grim Hades of mediaeval imagination,
summoning by name a long list of the Scottish nobility, of whom one man
defied the portent and refused the call and was saved. James paid no
heed to these warnings, whether supernatural or otherwise, or perhaps
was too far committed to give any heed to them, carried away by the wild
and fatal stream which had caught his feet, with something of that
extraordinary impetus of natural tendency long restrained which acts
with tenfold force when at last yielded to. It is unnecessary either to
tell the story of all the foolish fatal lingerings upon the ill-omened
way: trifling with treacherous ladies for whom he cared nothing, cartels
from Surrey; the abandonment of a strong position, lest it should give
him an advantage, in ever greater and greater folly of chivalry: the
refusal to attack, or let his artillery attack, till his foes were all
safely over the bridge: all exhibitions of high honour gone mad with the
intoxication of fate. The Spaniard's letter comes back in full
significance as we watch with aching hearts the fatal fray. "He said to
me that his subjects serve him with their persons and goods, in just or
unjust quarrels, exactly as he wishes, and that therefore he does not
think it right to begin any warlike undertaking without being himself
the first in danger." The knight-errant kept his _consigne_ of honour to
the last. He betrayed his people to the most utter defeat they had ever
encountered, but he was himself the first victim.

Thus died the only Stewart king who ever seemed to have a fair prospect
of escaping the fate of his unfortunate race. The worm in his
cons