as the walls themselves, standing out
with straight defiant gables against the northern blue.

King Robert III was a feeble, sickly, and poor-spirited king, and he had
a prodigal son of that gay, brilliant, attractive, and impracticable
kind which is so well known in fiction and romance, and, alas! also so
familiar in common life. David, Duke of Rothesay, was the first in the
Scotch records who was ever raised to that rank--nothing above the
degree of Earl having been known in the north before the son and brother
of the King, the latter by the fatal title of Albany, brought a new
degree into the roll of nobility. Young David, all unknowing of the
tragic fate before him, was then a daring and reckless youth, held
within bounds, as would appear, by the influence of a good and wise
mother, and if an anxiety and trouble, at least as yet no disgrace to
the throne. He was the contemporary of another madcap prince, far better
known to us, of whose pranks we are all more than indulgent, and whose
name has the attraction of youth and wit and freedom and boundless
humour to the reader still. David of Scotland has had no one to
celebrate his youthful adventures like him whose large and splendid
touch has made Prince Hal[1] so fine a representative of all that is
careless and gay in prodigal youth, with its noble qualities but half in
abeyance, and abounding spirit and humour and reckless fancy making its
course of wild adventure comprehensible even to the gravest. Perhaps the
licence of the Stewart blood carried the hapless northern prince into
more dangerous adventures than the wild fun of Gadshill and Eastcheap.
And Prince David's future had already been compromised by certain sordid
treacheries about his marriage when he first appears in history, without
the force of character which changed Prince Hal into a conquering leader
and strong sovereign, but with all the chivalrous instincts of a young
knight. He had been appointed at a very early age Lieutenant of the
Kingdom to replace his father, it being "well seen and kenned that our
lorde the Kyng for sickness of his person may not travail to govern the
realm," with full provision of counsellors for his help and guidance;
which argues a certain confidence in his powers. But the cares of
internal government were at this point interrupted by the more urgent
necessity of repelling an invasion, a danger not unusual, yet naturally
of an exciting kind.

[1] We here take Shakspeare's