oughout
Scotland. It was the death-warrant of poor old King Robert in his
retirement. He lingered out a weary year in sickness and sorrow, and
when the anniversary of his son's loss came round again, died at
Rothesay, in Bute, amid the lovely lakes and islets of western
Scotland--a scene of natural peace and tranquillity, which, let us hope,
shed some little balm upon the heart of the helpless superseded
sovereign. Perhaps he loved the place because it had given his title to
his murdered boy, the hapless David, so gallant and so gay. There is
something more than ordinarily pathetic and touching in the misfortunes
of the feeble in an age of iron. As civilisation advances they have
means of protecting themselves, but not in a time which is all for the
strongest. One son buried, like any peasant's son, ignobly in the Abbey
of Lindores: the other in an English prison, at the mercy of the "auld
enemy," whom Scotland had again and again resisted to the death: and his
kingdom entirely gone from him, in the hands of his arrogant and
imperious brother; there was nothing left for poor King Robert but to
die.

Thus James became at thirteen, and in an English castle, the King of
Scotland. His prison, however, proved a noble school instead of an
ignoble confinement to his fine and elevated spirit. The name of Stewart
has never been so splendidly illustrated as by this patriotic and
chivalrous Prince. No doubt it is infinitely to the credit of the
English kings, both Henrys, IV and V, that he received from them all the
advantages of education that could have been given to a prince of their
own blood--advantages by which he profited nobly, acquiring every art
and cultivation that belonged to his rank, besides that divine art which
no education can communicate, and which is bestowed by what would seem a
caprice, were it not divine, upon prince or ploughman as it pleases God.
For above all his knightly and kingly qualities, his studies in chivalry
and statesmanship, which prepared him to fill the throne of Scotland as
no man save his great ancestor Bruce had yet filled it, James Stewart
was a poet of no mean rank, not unworthy to be named even in the
presence of Chaucer, and well worthy of the place which he has kept in
literature. We need not enter here into that part of his history which
concerns another locality full of great and princely associations--the
noble Castle of Windsor, where the royal youth first saw and sang the
lady of