ls in all countries are apt to say "as happy as a king." I
wonder if they ever think of the meaning of that phrase. Certainly a
less enviable position than that of this young king cannot well be
imagined. Holbein's portraits show him to us a delicate, precocious
looking boy, with fine features, small mouth, and odd narrow eyes which
glance with a keen penetration from under the sleepy lids. If he had
been the son of some country squire he would have been living out of
doors, making his frail little body strong and healthy, doing ordinary
lessons, riding and leaping and playing tennis like any other lad of his
age. But instead of this, we find him a mere tool in the hands of
unscrupulous advisers, who are filling their own pockets and ruining the
kingdom at his expense. He is pondering on matters of state when he
ought to have been playing at marbles. Sitting for long hours in the
council chamber, when he should have been riding about the forest with
his hawks and hounds. Galloping all the night through, from Hampton
Court to Windsor, when his uncle Somerset carried him off to serve his
own ends, and thereby did the king's delicate chest an injury which it
never recovered. And at length, after six years of a miserable,
troublous reign, dying at Greenwich before he was sixteen, with the
lords in council and the judges quarreling about his death bed. Poor
boy! surely no one would be tempted to envy his fate.

He was buried at Westminster in the splendid chapel that his grandfather
built and that his father finished under "the matchless altar" which
stood at the head of Henry the Seventh's tomb. This sumptuous
"touchstone altar, all of one piece," with its "excellent workmanship of
brass," was the work of Torregiano, the rival who broke Michael Angelo's
nose in the gardens of St. Mark at Florence. He came to England to
complete the adornment of Henry the Seventh's chapel, and lived for
twenty years in the precincts of the Abbey, where he kept up his
Florentine reputation by sundry fighting feats against the "bears of
Englishmen."

The Altar was "by the hot-brained zealots in 41 (1641) demolished; so
that not the least footsteps now remain;" and only a gray stone slab
marks the resting place of the last male heir of the Tudors. But when in
1868 Dean Stanley made the memorable search in the vaults of the Abbey
to discover where James the First was buried--a mystery unsolved till
then--a beautiful piece of a carved white marb