"March 31, 1622.
"I hope my letter miscarried not; if it did I am in a sweet pickle. I desired to hear from you of the receipt and extinction of it. Though there is no danger in my letters whilst report is so rife, yet when it is forgotten they will not be so safe; but your danger is as great as mine—
"Mr. Downham was with we, now come from London. He told me that it was three years ago since those verses were delivered to the king in a dream, by his Master Buchanan, who seemed to check him severely, as he used to do; and his Majesty, in his dream, seemed desirous to pacify him, but he, turning away with a frowning countenance, would utter those verses, which his Majesty, perfectly remembering, repeated the next day, and many took notice of them. Now, by occasion of the late soreness in his arm, and the doubtfulness what it would prove; especially having, by mischance, fallen into the fire with that arm, the remembrance of the verses began to trouble him."
It appears that these verses were of a threatening nature, since, in a melancholy fit, they were recalled to recollection after an interval of three years; the verses are lost to us, with the letter which contained them.]
James, even by the confession of his bitter satirist, Francis Osborne, "dedicated rainy weather to his standish, and fair to his hounds." His life had the uniformity of a student's; but the regulated life of a learned monarch must have weighed down the gay and dissipated with the deadliest monotony. Hence one of these courtiers declared that, if he were to awake after a sleep of seven years' continuance, he would undertake to enumerate the whole of his Majesty's occupations, and every dish that had been placed on the table during the interval. But this courtier was not aware that the monotony which the king occasioned him was not so much in the king himself as in his own volatile spirit.
The table of James I. was a trial of wits, says a more learned courtier, who often partook of these prolonged conversations: those genial and convivial conferences were the recreations of the king, and the means often of advancing those whose talents had then an opportunity of discovering themselves. A life so constant in its pursuits was to have been expected from the temper of him who, at the view of the Bodleian library, exclaimed, "Were I not a king, I would be an university man; and if it were so that I must be a prisoner, I would have no other prison than this library, and be chained together with all these goodly authors."[A]
[Footnote A: In this well-known exclamation of James I., a witty allusion has been probably overlooked. The king had in his mind the then prevalent custom of securing books by fastening them to the shelves by chains long enough to reach to the reading-desks under them.]
Study, indeed, became one of the businesses of life with our contemplative monarch; and so zealous was James to form his future successor, that he even seriously engaged in the education of both his sons. James I. offers the singular spectacle of a father who was at once a preceptor and a monarch: it was in this spirit the king composed his "Basilicon Doron; or, His Majesty's Instructions to his dearest Son Henry the Prince," a work of which something more than the intention is great; and he directed the studies of the unfortunate Charles. That both these princes were no common pupils may be fairly attributed to the king himself. Never did the character of a young prince shoot out with nobler promises than Henry; an enthusiast for literature and arms, that prince early showed a great and commanding spirit. Charles was a man of fine taste: he had talents and virtues, errors and misfortunes; but he was not without a spirit equal to the days of his trial.
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