In a great court of judicature, when the interference of the royal authority was ardently solicited, the magnanimous monarch replied:—
"Kings ruled by their laws, as God did by the laws of nature; and ought as rarely to put in use their supreme authority as God does his power of working miracles."
Notwithstanding his abstract principles, his knowledge and reflection showed him that there is a crisis in monarchies and a period in empires; and in discriminating between a king and a tyrant, he tells the prince—
"A tyranne's miserable and infamous life armeth in end his own subjects to become his burreaux; and although this rebellion be ever unlawful on their part, yet is the world so wearied of him, that his fall is little meaned (minded) by the rest of his subjects, and smiled at by his neighbours."
And he desires that the prince, his son, should so perform his royal duties, that, "In case ye fall in the highway, yet it should be with the honourable report and just regret of all honest men." In the dedicatory sonnet to Prince Henry of the "Basilicon Doron," in verses not without elevation, James admonishes the prince to
Represse the proud, maintaining aye the right;
Walk always so, as ever in his sight,
Who guards the godly, plaguing the prophane.
The poems of James I. are the versifications of a man of learning and meditation. Such an one could not fail of producing lines which reflect the mind of their author. I find in a MS. these couplets, which condense an impressive thought on a favourite subject:—
Crownes have their compasse, length of daies their date,
Triumphs their tombes, Felicitie her fate;
Of more than earth, can earth make none partaker;
But knowledge makes the king most like his Maker.[A]
[Footnote A: "Harl. MSS.," 6824.]
These are among the elevated conceptions the king had formed of the character of a sovereign, and the feeling was ever present in his mind. James has preserved an anecdote of Henry VIII., in commenting on it, which serves our purpose:—