up his hands to God and yielded the spirit."

There are many pathetic death scenes in history, but few more touching.
His father, after a splendid and prosperous life, had fallen "in the
lost battle, borne down by the flying;" he, after a career almost as
chivalrous and splendid and full of noble work for his country, in a
still more forlorn overthrow; his hopes all gone from him, his strength
broken in his youth. Nothing, it would seem, could save these princes,
so noble and so unfortunate. It was enough to bear the name of James
Stewart to be weighed down by cruel Fate. But before his spirit shook
off the mortal coil a ray of peace had shot through the clouds; he
looked upon the anxious faces of his friends, some of whom at least must
surely have been true friends, bound to him by comradeship and
brotherhood, with that low laugh which is one of the most touching
expressions of weakened and failing humanity--love and kindness in it,
and a certain pleasure to see them round him; and yet to be free of it
all--the heavy kingship, the hopes that ever failed, the friends that so
rarely were true. The lips that touched that cold hand which he kissed
before he gave to them must have trembled, perhaps with compunction, let
us hope with some vow of fidelity to his memory and trust.

Thus died the last of the five Jameses--the last in one sense of that
unfortunate but gallant line. A life more swept by storms, more rent
asunder by conflicting passions and influences, more tragic still and
passionate than theirs, was to part them from the singularly changed,
modified, and modernised successors who, with a difference, were to wear
yet drop this ancient crown. The Stewarts after Mary are no longer like
those that went before. James's dying words came in some curious fashion
true, though not as he thought. It came with a lass and it went with a
lass that ancient crown. When another James reached the throne Scotland
was no more as it had been.

It may seem a fantastic chronology to end here the records of the
Stewards of Scotland: but it is I think justified by this change, which
altered altogether the character of the history and the circumstances of
the monarchs. Henceforward new agencies, new powers, were at work in the
little proud and self-contained kingdom, which had maintained its
independence and individuality so long. Torn asunder by rival
influences, by intrigues incessant and profound, by that struggle
between the old a