character and a high spirit. The short life of Henry was
passed in a school of prowess, and amidst an academy of literature. Of
the king's paternal solicitude, even to the hand and the letter-writing
of Prince Henry when young, I have preserved a proof in the article of
"The History of Writing-masters." Charles the First, in his youth more
particularly designed for a studious life, with a serious character,
was, however, never deficient in active bravery and magnanimous
fortitude. Of Elizabeth, the Queen of Bohemia, tried as she was by such
vicissitudes of fortune, it is much to be regretted that the
interesting story remains untold; her buoyant spirits rose always above
the perpetual changes of a princely to a private state--a queen to an
exile! The father of such children derives some distinction for
capacity, in having reared such a noble offspring; and the king's marked
attention to the formation of his children's minds was such as to have
been pointed out by Ben Jonson, who, in his "Gipsies Metamorphosed,"
rightly said of James, using his native term--

You are an honest, good man, and have care of YOUR BEARNS (bairns).

Among the flouts and gibes so freely bespattering the personal character
of James the First, is one of his coldness and neglect of his queen. It
would, however, be difficult to prove by any known fact that James was
not as indulgent a husband as he was a father. Yet even a writer so well
informed as Daines Barrington, who, as a lawyer, could not refrain from
lauding the royal sage during his visit to Denmark, on his marriage, for
having borrowed three statutes from the Danish code, found the king's
name so provocative of sarcasm, that he could not forbear observing,
that James "spent more time in those courts of judicature than in
_attending upon his destined consort_."--"Men of all sorts have taken a
pride to gird at me," might this monarch have exclaimed. But everything
has two handles, saith the ancient adage. Had an austere puritan chosen
to observe that James the First, when abroad, had lived jovially; and
had this historian then dropped silently the interesting circumstance of
the king's "spending his time in the Danish courts of judicature," the
fact would have borne him out in his reproof; and Francis Osborne,
indeed, has censured James for giving marks of his _uxoriousness_! There
was no deficient gallantry in the conduct of James the First to his
queen; the very circumstance, that when