armies and quells insurrections, a boy of thirteen,
trained amid all the exciting circumstances which surrounded James
Stewart, might well have made a definite choice and acted with full
royal intention, perhaps not strong enough to be carried out by its own
impulse, yet giving a real sanction and force to the power which an
elder and stronger man was in a position to wield. We have no such means
of forming an idea of the character and personality of the second James
as we have of his father. No voice of his sounds in immortal accents to
commemorate his loves or his sadness. He appears first passively in the
hands of conspirators who played him in his childhood one against the
other, a poor little royal pawn in the big game which was so bloody and
so tortuous. His young memory must have been full of scares and of
guileful expedients, each party and individual about him trying to
circumvent the other. Never was child brought up among wilder chances.
The bewildering horror of his father's death, the sudden melancholy
coronation, and all the nobles in their sounding steel kneeling at his
baby feet, which would be followed in his experience by no expansion or
indulgence, but by the confinement of the castle; the terrible
loneliness of an imprisoned child, broken after a while by the sudden
appearance of his mother, and that merry but alarming jest of his
conveyance in the great chest, half stifled in the folds of her
embroideries and cloth of gold. Then another flight, and renewed stately
confinement among his old surroundings, monotony broken by sudden
excitements and the babble in his ears of uncomprehended politics, from
which, however, his mind, sharpened by the royal sense that these
mysterious affairs were really his own, would no doubt come to find
meaning at a far earlier age than could be possible under other
circumstances. And then that terrible scene, most appalling of all, when
he had to look on and see the two lads, not so much older than himself,
young gallants, so brave and fine, to whom the boy's heart would draw in
spite of all he might have heard against them, so much nearer to himself
than either governor or chancellor, those two noble Douglases, suddenly
changed under his eyes from gay and welcome guests to horrified victims,
with all the tragic passion of the betrayed and lost in their young
eyes. Such a scene above all must have done much to mature the
intelligence of a boy full like all his race of spi