ic career was to
be found even in the least defensible of his race.

King Robert, who had for some time been retired from the troubles of the
throne, a poor man, infirm in health and in purpose, virtually deposed
in favour of the son who was Lieutenant or the brother who was Regent of
the kingdom, and from whom all his domestic comfort had been taken as
well as his power, was driven to desperation by this blow. He had lost
his wife and his best counsellors; he had never been strong enough to
restrain his son, nor resist his brother. David, his first-born and
heir, the gay and handsome youth who was dazzling and delightful to his
father's eyes even in his worst follies, had been, as no doubt he felt,
delivered over to his worst enemy by that father's own tremulous hand;
and the heart-broken old man in his bereavement and terror could only
think of getting the one boy who remained to him safe and out of harm's
way, perhaps with the feeling that Albany might once again persuade him
to deliver over this last hope into his hands if he did not take a
decisive step at once. The boy-prince was at St. Andrews, pursuing his
studies, under the care of the bishop, when his brother was murdered;
and from thence he was sent, when the preparations were complete, across
the Firth to the Bass, there to await a ship which should take him to
France. It was a forlorn beginning for the Prince of Scotland to be thus
hastily taken from his books and the calm of a semi-monastic life and
hurried off to that wild rock in the middle of the waves, probably with
his brother's awful story thrilling in his ears and his terrible uncle
within reach, pushing forward a mock inquiry in Parliament into the
causes of Rothesay's death. How easy it would have been for that uncle
with the supreme power in his hands to seize the boy who now stood alone
between him and the throne; and with what burning at the heart, of
impotent rage and fierce indignation, the little Prince, old enough to
know and feel his father's helplessness, his own abandonment, and his
brother's terrible end, must have been conveyed away to the sea
stronghold among the bitter eastern blasts. James, the first of the
name, was not one of the feeble ones of the family. With all the romance
and poetry of his race he conjoined a great spirit and a noble
intelligence, and even at twelve, in the precocious development of that
age of blood, when even a royal stripling had to learn to defend himself