and James was
ready for any atrocity when he was convinced that his brothers were a
danger to his life and crown. The youngest, the handsome and gallant
Mar, was killed by one treachery or another; and Alexander of Albany,
the inheritor of that ill-omened title, was laid up in prison to be safe
out of his brother's way.

We find ourselves entirely in the regions of romance in this unfortunate
reign. Sir Walter Scott has painted for us the uncomfortable Court of
Louis with his barber and his prophet, and Dumas has reproduced almost
the identical story in his _Vingt Ans Apres_, of the Duke of Albany's
escape from Edinburgh. There could scarcely be a more curious scene.
Strangely enough James himself was resident in the castle when his
brother was a prisoner there. One would have thought that so near a
neighbourhood would have seemed dangerous to the alarmed monarch, but
perhaps he thought, on the other hand, that watch and ward would be kept
more effectually under his own eyes. Mar had died in the Canongate,
perhaps in the Tolbooth there, according to tradition in a bath, where
he was bled to death, probably in order that a pretence of illness or
accident might be alleged; and Edinburgh, no doubt, was full of dark
whispers of this strange end of one prince, and the danger of the other,
shut up within the castle walls where the King's minions had full sway,
and any night might witness a second dark deed. Prince Alexander's
friends must have been busy and eager without, while he was not so
strictly under bar and bolt inside that he could not make merry with the
castle officials now and then, and cheat an evening with pleasant talk
and a glass of good wine with a young captain of the guard. One day
there came to him an intimation of the arrival of a ship at Leith with
wine from France, accompanied by some private token that there was more
in this announcement than met the ear. Albany accordingly sent a trusted
servant to order two flasks of the wine, in one of which, contained in a
tube of wax, was enclosed a letter, in the other a rope by which to
descend the castle walls. The whole story is exactly as Dumas tells the
escape of the Duc de Beaufort, though whether the romancer could have
seen the old records of Scotland, or if his legend is sanctioned by the
authentic history of France, I am unable to tell. Alexander, like the
prince in the novel, invited the Captain of the Guard to sup with him to
try the new wine--an invit