the fiercest precipices interposed to secure for
little James as for other children the nursery calm, the infant
happiness which is the right of childhood. No more delightful picture of
tender infancy, the babbling of the first baby words, the sweet exigence
and endless requirements of a child, was ever made than that which Sir
David Lindsay, the future Lyon King, whom Sir Walter Scott in _gaiete de
coeur_ (that he should ever be wrong!) introduces in full panoply of
heraldic splendour before Flodden, but who was but a youth in the new
James's baby days, gives in his "Epistle to the King's Grace,"
dedicatory to one of his poems. We will venture, though with
compunction, once more as we have already done, to modernise the
spelling as far as possible, so as to present no difficulty to the
reader in the understanding of these delightful verses.

"When thou was young I bore thee in mine arme
Full tenderlie till thou began to gang,
And in thy bed oft happit thee full warme;
With lute in hand then sweetly to thee sang.
Sometime in dancing wondrously I flang,
And sometime playing farces on the floor,
And sometime on mine office taking cure.

"And sometime like a fiend transfigurate,
And sometime like the grisly ghost of Gye,
In divers forms oft times disfigurate,
And sometime dissagyist full pleasantly.
So since thy birth I have continually
Been occupied and aye to thy pleasoure,
And sometime Server, Coppon, and Carvoure."

In another poem he adds, upon the same subject, returning to the
pleasant memory, the following happy description:--

"How, as a chapman bears his pack,
I bore thy Grace upon my back,
And sometime stridling on my neck,
Dancing with many a bend and beck.
The first syllables that thou didst moote
Was '_Pa, Da Lyn_' upon the lute.
And aye when thou camest from the school
Then I behoved to play the fool."

"Play, Davy Lindsay:" the touch of nature brings the water to one's
eyes. Davy Lindsay had yet to play many a spring before King James, and
some that were not gay. But the gentle stripling with the infant on his
shoulder, the pertinacity of the little babbling cry, the "homely
springs" played offhand that it was pity to hear, but which the lad
enjoyed almost as much in laughing at their dashing incorrectness as the
baby who knew only that it was a pleasant sound--how bright and vivid is