f he be come, I suppose he'll understand
himself so well as our prisoner, that he will immediately give
himself up to us again.

"The King wears paper caps under his wige, which I know you also do;
they cannot be had at Perth, so I wish you could send some on, for
his own are near out.

"We are in want of paper for printing; is there no way to send us
some from your side?

"Pray, send my wife one of the Scots and one of the English
declarations at the same time my letter goes, but under another
cover. Adieu.

"Since writeing I have yours of the thirty-first and first, for
which I thank you, and am just going to read them to my master."

Little dependance can be placed on the entire accuracy of either of
these varying descriptions,--the one penned by a disappointed, and
perhaps wavering, adherent, the other by a man whose personal interests
were irrevocably involved with those of James. We must trust to other
sources to enable us to form a due estimate of the merits of this
ill-starred Prince.

James Stuart was at this time in his twenty-seventh year. From his very
cradle he had been, as it might seem to the superstitious, marked by
fate for a destiny peculiarly severe. His real birth was long disputed,
without the shadow of a reason, except what was suggested by a base
court intrigue. This slur upon his legitimacy, which was afterwards
virtually wiped away by the British Parliament, was nevertheless the
greatest obstacle to his accession, there being nothing so difficult to
obliterate as a popular impression of that nature.

Educated within the narrow precincts of the exiled court, James owed the
good that was within him to a disposition naturally humane, placable,
and just, as well as to the communion with a mother, the fidelity of
whose attachment to her exiled consort bespoke a finer quality of mind
than that which Nature had bestowed on the object of her devotion. By
this mother James must doubtless have been embued with a desire for
recovering those dominions and that power for which Mary of Modena, like
Henrietta Maria, sighed in vain, as the inheritance of her son; but the
stimulus was applied to a disposition with which a private life was far
more consonant than the cares of sovereignty. Rising as he does to
respectability, when we contrast the good nature and mild good sense of
the Chevalier with the bigotry of James the Second,--or view his career,
blame