[839] See this remarkable story in Cicero de Nat. Deorum, lib. 3, c. 28. Cic. de Offic. lib. 1, c. 30; see also Val. Max. 1, 8.
XIII.
VERSES BY K. CHARLES I.
"This prince, like his father, did not confine himself to prose: Bishop Burnet has given us a pathetic elegy, said to be written by Charles in Carisbrook castle (in 1648). The poetry is most uncouth and unharmonious, but there are strong thoughts in it, some good sense, and a strain of majestic piety." Mr. Walpole's Royal and Noble Authors, vol. i.
It is in his Memoirs of the Duke of Hamilton, p. 379, that Burnet hath preserved this elegy, which he tells us he had from a gentleman, who waited on the king at the time when it was written, and copied it out from the original. It is there intitled, Majesty in Misery: or An Imploration to the King of Kings.
Hume hath remarked of these stanzas, "That the truth of the sentiment, rather than the elegance of expression, renders them very pathetic." See his Hist. 1763, 4to. vol. v. pp. 437, 442, which is no bad comment upon them.—These are almost the only verses known of Charles's composition. Indeed a little Poem On a quiet Conscience, printed in the Poetical Calendar, 1763, vol. viii. is attributed to K. Charles I.; being reprinted from a thin 8vo. published by Nahum Tate, called Miscellanea Sacra, or Poems on Divine and Moral Subjects.
Great monarch of the world, from whose power springs
The potency and power of kings,
Record the royal woe my suffering sings;