well; and we may here relate the method he adopted to measure the passing hours, in his want of those more artificial time-pieces which we possess. Having made his chaplains, as Asser in his simple narrative informs us, procure the necessary quantity of wax, he ordered six candles to be prepared, each of twelve inches long, which he had found would together burn for four and twenty hours. Having marked the inches on them, therefore, he ordered that they should be lighted in succession, and each three inches that were consumed he considered as recording the flight of an hour. "But finding," continues the historian, "that the candles burned away more quickly at one time than at another, on account of the rushing violence of the winds, which sometimes would blow night and day without intermission, through the doors and windows, the numerous chinks in the walls, or the slender covering of the tents, he bethought him how he might prevent this inconvenience, and having contrived artfully and wisely, he ordered that a lanthorn should be fairly fashioned of wood and horn; for white horn, when scraped thin, allows the light to pass through even like glass. The candle, therefore, being placed in the lanthorn, thus wonderfully constructed, as we have said, of wood and horn, was both protected from the wind, and shone during the night as luminously without as within." Every heart will acknowledge that there is something not a little interesting, and even touching, in these homely details, which paint to us so graphically the poor accommodations of every kind in the midst of which Alfred had to pursue his studies, and the humble matters with which his great mind was often obliged to occupy itself in contriving the means of gratifying its noble aspirations. This illustrious man, indeed, seems almost to have lifted himself quite above the tyranny of circumstances;

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realizing, in the most disadvantageous, nearly all that could be expected or desired in the most favourable, The difficulties with which he had to contend, in truth, formed the very soil out of which no small portion of his greatness grew. Among kings he is not only the Great, but the very greatest. If we look merely to his zeal and services in behalf of literature, it is impossible to name any royal personage that can be compared with him, either in classic antiquity or in modern times. A genuine love for letters, and a proficiency in them, in the possessor of a throne, is worthy of our admiration, in whatever age or country the phenomenon may be recorded to have been witnessed; because it must always be considered as a striking example of a triumph over seductions that are generally, of all others, found the most difficult to resist, and have, accordingly, been of all others the most seldom resisted. But of the other learned kings of whom we read in history, some were literary in a literary age; others, naturally unfitted for the more active duties of their station, took to philosophy, or pedantry, as a refuge from insignificance; some had caught the love and the habit of study before they had mounted a throne, or had dreamed of mounting one; above all, most, if not all of them, had been carefully educated and trained to letters in their youth. But it is told only of Alfred, that, without an example to look to, without even the advantages of the very scantiest education, in an unlearned age, and a still more unlearned country, he, who had been only a soldier from his youth upwards, withdrew himself of his own accord from the rude and merely sensual enjoyments of all his predecessors and all his contemporaries, to devote himself to intellectual pursuits, and to seek to intertwine with the martial laurels that already bound his brow, the more honourable wreath of literary distinction.

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Of the royal personages of our own country who have distinguished themselves by their love and cultivation of letters, the most eminent, next to Alfred, is JAMES I. of Scotland, whose poem, entitled the King's Quhair," composed by him during his imprisonment in Windsor Castle, we have already men. tioned *. James was born in 1394, but having been taken prisoner by the king of England in 1405, was detained in that country, mostly in close confinement, till his thirtieth year; after which, having been allowed to return to Scotland, he reigned for thirteen years, and was at last cruelly assassinated in the Carthusian monastery, at Perth, on the 20th of February, 1437, by a faction of his nobles, whom his attempted reforms dissatisfied. Literature had been the principal solace of James's long imprisonment, and he brought with him to the throne the tastes which he had acquired in his exile. He certainly contributed very essentially, even during his short reign, to promote the civilization of his native country. Nothing can exceed the warmth of the admiration with which all the old historians speak of his genius and accomplishments, and of the effect which his example had in diffusing among his people that spirit of literary cultivation, and love for all elegant and intellectual accomplishments by which he was himself distinguished. He was a proficient, we are told, in the Latin language, and some authorities add, even in the Greek, although this last statement must be regarded as apocryphal, all things considered. His mastery over his native tongue was, at all events, his most remarkable endowment. The songs and other metrical pieces which he composed in the Scottish dialect, long continued to be the delight of all classes of his countrymen; and to their influence we are, in all probability, to trace much of * See vol. i. p. 283.

that universal sensibility to poetry, which has ever since distinguished the Scottish peasantry, and which has displayed itself in the creation of a body of traditionary verse, of wonderful extent and richness. Give me, some one has said, the making of a people's ballads, and I care not who has the making of their laws. If the opinion conveyed in this remark be correct, James I. perhaps influenced the character of his countrymen quite as much as any of their legislators. Some authorities also claim for this prince the honour of being the father of the music, as well as of the poetry, of his country. He is recorded by our old chroniclers to have been eminently skilled both in vocal and instrumental music, and to have performed on no less than eight different instruments, of which the one on which he most excelled is stated to have been the harp. But it is certain that from the time of James we may date the birth at least of the literature of Scotland; to which, indeed, he seems to have also given not a little of the peculiar character that long distinguished it. His own writings, as has been stated, were poetical compositions, in the style that had been so recently introduced by Chaucer, whom, in his Quhair, he expressly mentions as his master. Those of them that have come down to us, evince powers both of pathos and of humour of the very highest order, and such as no other Scottish poet, with the exception of Burns, can be considered as having equalled. Before his day, Fordun had written his prose chronicle of Scottish kings, and Barbour his metrical work entitled The Bruce; but these, notwithstanding some passages of vivid description in the latter, which certainly give its author considerable pre-eminence among the class to which he belongs, were merely such works as have been produced among every people having the use of letters, as soon as they have acquired for themselves

what may be called a history; and indicate not so much that a national literature has taken root among them, as simply that they have reached a certain antiquity, and have a past national existence to look back upon. That which alone we can properly call the authorship of Scotland commences with the works of king James, and is continued by those of Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, and Sir David Lyndsay; who may all in some sort be considered as his imitators, or at least as having, like himself, taken their inspiration from that new-born poetry of England with which he, there can be little doubt, was the first to make his countrymen acquainted.

Few kings, therefore, in spite of the failure of many of his projected political reforms, have done more for their subjects than James did for his. He regenerated them by means more powerful than any merely political contrivances, when he exhibited before them for the first time the graces and attractions of intellectual cultivation, and gradually seduced them by the charm of his example to the love of the arts and elegances of civilized life. Laws and institutions are, after all, in themselves but the dead skeleton of society, and can only derive their life and efficiency from the spirit breathed into them by the character and moral condition of the people.

They

are the body; this is the animating soul. In giving, therefore, to his countrymen the first impulses of literary refinement, he gave them something better even than good laws, because it was that which, while it would eventually enable them to secure good laws for themselves, at the same time could alone fit them for their enjoyment. His life, not less than his death, was a sacrifice to his zeal for their improvement; for, with tastes and habits that tended to separate him so completely from his subjects, his residence, even as a king, in Scotland, must have been