survived all her
children. Anne believed that her children's deaths were sent in
punishment of her unfilial conduct; and she would have restored her
nephew, the Pretender, to the British throne, but that the Jacobites
were the silliest political creatures that ever triumphed in the
how-not-to-do-it business, and could not even hold their mouths open
for the rich and ripened fruit to drop into them.

The first of the English Stuarts, James I., is suspected of having
allowed his jealousy of his eldest son, the renowned Prince Henry, to
carry him to the extent of child-murder. The Stuarts are called the
Fated Line, and it is certain that none of their number, from Robert
II.--who got the Scottish throne in virtue of his veins containing a
portion of the blood of the Bruce, and so regalized the family, which,
like the Bruces, was of Norman origin, and originally Fitzalan
by name--to Charles Edward, and the Cardinal York, who died but
yesterday, as it were, but had a wonderful run of bad luck. They had
capital cards, but they knew not how to play them. With them, to play
was to lose, and the most fortunate of their number were those kings
who played as little as they could, such as James I. and Charles II.
Those who lost the most were those who played the hardest, as Charles
I. and his second son, James II. Yet the family was a clever one, with
strong traits, both of character and talent, that ought to have made
it the most successful of ruling races, and would have made it so,
if its chiefs could have learned to march with the times. They had to
contend, in Scotland, with one of the fiercest and most unprincipled
aristocracies that ever tried the patience and traversed the purposes
of monarchs who really aimed at the good government of their people;
and the idiosyncrasy contracted during more than two centuries of
Scottish rule clung to the family after it went to England, and found
itself living under altogether a different state of things. What was
virtue in Scotland became vice in England; and the ultra-monarchists,
who came into existence not long after James I. succeeded to
Elizabeth, helped to spoil the Stuarts. Both James and his successor
were dominated by Scotch traditions, and supposed that they were
contending with men who had the same end in view that had been
regarded by the Douglases, the Hamiltons, the Ruthvens, the Lindsays,
and others of the old Scotch baronage. What helped to deceive them was
this,--that