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one day, and their father and maternal grandfather, a very old man, the Earl of Lennox, whose share in the matter it is difficult to make out, on the next. Thus James settled summarily the question between himself and his kinsmen. The house of Albany ended upon the scaffold, and however just their doom might have been, there was something appalling in this swift and sweeping revenge, carried out rigorously without a sign of hesitation by a young king, a happy bridegroom, an accomplished and gay cavalier.

      It must indeed be allowed, notwithstanding his poetry and his evident love of everything that was lovely and of good report, that the reign of the first James was a stern one. Every witness agrees as to his accomplishment, and that he was the flower of knighthood, of splendour and courtesy, the most chivalrous, the most daring, the most graceful and gracious of all his Court: and his genius as a poet is even more generally acknowledged. The King's "Quhair" as a poem is quite capable of standing on its own merits, and needs no additional prestige as the performance of a king. Had he been but a wandering minstrel Chaucer would have had no need to be ashamed of his pupil. It is full of delightful descriptions of nature and love and youth: the fresh morning as it rises upon the castled heights, the singing of the birds and fluttering of the leaves, the impulse of a young heart even in the languor of imprisonment to start up and meet the sun, with all the springs of new life which at that verdant season come with every new day—the apparition of the beautiful one suddenly appearing in the old immemorial garden with all its flowers, herself the sweetest and the fairest of flowers, all are set before us, with a harmony and music not to be excelled. The young Prince chafing at his imprisonment, dreaming of all the fantastic wonderful things he might do were he free, yet still so full of irrepressible hope that his impatience and his longings are but another form of pleasure, takes shape and identity as distinct as if he had been one of the figures in that famous pilgrimage to Canterbury, which had been part of his training in this delightful art. If James had never reigned at all he would still have lived through all these centuries in the guise in which he stood at his window on that May morning, and suddenly, amid his youthful dreams, beheld the lovely vision of the Lady Jane emerging from under the young spring verdure of the trees. There is a certain window not generally supposed to be that at which the royal captive stood—a window in the Norman Tower of Windsor Castle, now fitly garnished and guarded by sympathetic hands, from which the spectator looking out upon the deep moat-garden underneath in the circle about the old donjon will scarcely be able to withstand the thrill of feeling which attends a poetic scene and incident fully realised. Nothing could be more green, more fresh, more full of romance and association, than this garden where all is youthful as the May, yet old in endless tradition, the garden of the Edwards and Henrys, where Chaucer himself may have thought over his accounts or taken the delightful image of his young squire "synging" who was, "or flouting all the day" from among some group of bright-faced lads in their bravery, where the countess who dropped her garter may have wandered, and the hapless Henry, the mild and puny child who was born there while James was undergoing his far from harsh captivity, played. James Stewart's name, had he been no king, would have been associated with this place, as that of his master in poetry is with the flowery ways of Kent.

      Nor was his inspiration derived alone from the well of English undefiled. A still more wonderful gift developed in him when he got home to his native country. Though the tones of Scotch humour were much less refined, and its utterances at that early period could be scarcely more than the jests and unwritten ballads of the populace, yet his early acquaintance with them must have lingered in the young Prince's mind, acquiring additional zest from the prepossessions of exile and the longing for home. And when the polished singer of the King's "Quhair" found himself again in his native land he seems to have burst forth with the most genuine impulse into the broad fun, rustical and natural and racy of the soil, which perhaps was more congenial to his Scottish audience. "Peblis to the Play" and "Christis Kirk on the Green" are poems full of the very breath of rural life and the rude yet joyous meetings of the country folk at kirk and market, which with wonderfully little difference of sentiment and movement also inspired Burns. He must have had a mind full of variety and wide human sympathy almost Shakspearian, who could step from the musings of Windsor and the beautiful heroine, all romance and ethereal splendour, to the lasses in their gay kirtles, and Hob and Raaf with their rustic "daffing," as true to the life as the Ayrshire clowns of Burns, and all the clumsy yet genial gambols of the village festival. It is one of the most curious and least to be expected transformations of poetic versatility—for it is even amazing how he could know the life into which he thus plunged joyous, as if he had been familiar with it from his childhood. King James was not without an object amid all the laughter and the pranks of his holiday. The King's cheerful ridicule of the clumsy fellows who could not draw the bow was intended, with a prick of scorn under the laughter, to rouse up his rustic lieges to emulation, not to be behind the southern pock-puddings whose deadly arrows were, in every encounter between Scots and English, the chief danger to the fighting men of the north. It is curious that this difference should have existed and continued with such obstinacy through all these fighting centuries; the Scotch spearmen were all but invulnerable in their steady square, like a rock, but they had little defence against the cloth-yard shafts of the English bowmen, which neither exhortation nor ridicule, neither prizes to win nor disaster to fear, could teach them to adopt. James laboured hard, in ways more practical than his poems, to introduce this new arm, but in vain. It was kept up languidly in holiday contentions, like that of Christis Kirk on the Green, while his life lasted; but when his reign was over and the momentary stimulus withdrawn the bows were all thrown away.

      The King's command of this humorous vein, so dear to his people, with its trenchant sketches from the life and somewhat rough jests, is wonderful, when his courtly breeding and long separation even from such knowledge of rustic existence as a prince is likely to obtain is considered. And the many-sided nature which made these humours so familiar and easy to him is a strange discovery in the midst of all the tragic circumstances of his life and reign. The union of the most delicate poetry and romance with that genial whim and fancy is unusual enough: but it is still more unusual to find the stern Justiciar, avenger of blood and redresser of wrong, the reconstructer of a distracted country, capable not only of the broad fun of the rustic ballad-maker, but of so tolerant and humorous a view of the humble commons, the underlying masses upon which society is built. For the first aspect of affairs in Scotland could not be a cheerful one: although it was rather with the nobles and gentlemen, the great proprietors of the country, who had to be summoned to exhibit their charters and prove their titles, partly no doubt with the view of discovering what Crown lands had been alienated by the Albany party, that the King's quarrel was, than with the humbler subjects of the nation.

      Yet there is no doubt, with all these lights and softening influences of character and genius, that his reign was a stern one. James had everything to reform in the country to which he came with so many new ideas and so enlarged a knowledge of what the internal economy of a nation might be made. It is rather against the general historical estimate of the talents and power of the Regent Albany that the new King should have found, as appears, so much to do for the reorganisation of the commonwealth—regulating the laws, appointing courts of justice, inquiring into the titles of property, and in every other way giving consistency and order to the affairs of Scotland. However, the lavish grants made to the great Scots lords and the licence given them to rule their vassals as they pleased arose not from weakness but from Albany's deliberate policy of securing a strong party on his side, a policy exactly opposed to that of James, whose heart was set on subduing these fierce nobles, and perhaps of developing the people at large, the nation itself, if that is not too modern an ambition. The reign of Law, broken and disturbed by a hundred storms, but still henceforward with a statute-book to fall back upon and some fitful authority at its command, began in Scotland in his day.

      There are some curious details in the Scotichronicon about the taxes, now, it would seem, for the first time levied upon the general mass of the people. In 1424, the year after James's return, a tax of twelvepence in the pound was imposed by the Parliament at Perth, for the maintenance of the King's state and payment of his ransom, upon all goods, lands, and annual revenues of whatever description, both spiritual and temporal, which was passed with the consent of the estates, no doubt under the stimulus of the general rejoicing at the King's return. This impost was to last for two years. An income tax so general and all-embracing could scarcely be expected to be popular, but for the first year it was

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