dungeon, that he is compelled by hunger and
request of friends to throw himself upon the
king's will. This was exactly what his
majesty wished, and had set all this machinery
in motion to obtain. He avoided by the
confession of the culprit, the chances of an
acquittal, and the exposure of an open trial;
and this was the legal document by which
the king decided the affair.

"James, by the Grace of God King of Scots. To
our justice, justice-clerk, and their deputies greeting.
For as much as John Kincaid of Craighouse is become
in our will for the abducting of Izabel Hutchinson,
widow; therefore we declare our will as follows, to
wit; that the said John Kincaid shall make payment
to us and our treasurer in our name, or to such others
as our said treasurer shall appoint and assign, of the
sum of two thousand five hundred marks, money of
our realm; as also that he shall deliver to us, and
our said treasurer, his brown horse; commanding
hereby, you our said justice, justice-clerk, and deputies
to cause, pronounce, and declare this our will against
the said John, judicially; and insert these presents in
our books of adjournal to have the strength of an act
or decree. Subscribed with our hand at Holyrood-
house, the last day of January, 1601 years.
JAMES REX.

What became of John Kincaid and the
winsome widow, we do not know. Let us
hope that the marriage was brought to pass
in a legal manner, and that part of her
fortune went to pay the enormous fine. May
we hope, also, that an extra fifty pounds
recovered the good brown horse?

These are but samples of the appearances
the King of Scots makes in his character of
Head of the Law. The mingled cruelty and
selfishness he displayed were never equalled
by any other ruler. Whether it was to murder
a crazy minister, as in the case of Ross,
or to make himself master of a good steed, as
in the case of Kincaid, the restless interference
of the British Solomon is always visible,
and the laws tortured to his purpose. The
subserviency of judge and jury, the base
adulation of the courtiers, the oppression of
the people, and the bloated self-sufficiency of
the monarch, might remind us of a certain
crowned head of the present time.  But the
skies of Scotland would need to be darkly,
beautifully blue, the Forth with its Inch-Keith
and Inch-Colm to be a sapphire sea
studded with emerald isles, to make the
parallel complete. Yet, will some future
generation— Heaven send it may be the
present!— shudder over the triumphs of King
Bomba and the sufferings of Poerio, as we
in this happier time look back with loathing
and pity on the blood-stained annals of King
James.

We cannot close these extracts from a very
valuable work, without entering a protest
against the attempts sometimes made to
gild over the infamies of the unfortunate
reign of King James the First. We
suspect even, that those who study Mr. Pitcairn's
volumes will cease to be either amused or
misled by the bonhommie and kindly
humours of the monarch in the Fortunes of
Nigel.

COMMON COOKERY.

IT has been too long an English fashion to
despise cookery: not the pleasure of good
living, but the art of making good food out of
unpromising material— of rendering the less
tempting and the less nutritious parts of
meat, palatable and nourishing by scientific
treatment. We have even embodied our
contempt in certain popular sneers at the kitchen
world of some of our neighbours; whose
economy seems to us mean rather than ingenious,
and whose culinary contrivances we
suspect to be unwholesome, instead of admiring
as infinitely better than our own. Yet
few blessings are of greater importance than
that of well feeding a dense population; and
if, by any application of unused material, or
by new combinations of those already in use,
the sum of a nation's food can be increased,
a larger national benefit will have been
wrought than many would like to acknowledge.
We know that a vast amount of
evil temper, and irritability, arises from indigestion,
and that indigestion is greatly helped,
if not caused, by bad cooking.

But the greatest impediment to a culinary
reformation exists among the people
themselves. The prejudices of the poor are so
extraordinary that it has always been a
matter of great difficulty to coax them
into the use of any new article of food. In
the time of the famine in Ireland, starving
men refused to eat Indian meal, and the
beggars of Munich during Count Romford's
great soup experiment there, would have
nothing to do with a certain diabolical root,
then lately imported into Bavaria: potatoes
were obliged to be disguised out of all
shape, mashed and mixed, and fairly smuggled
down their innocent throats. But, when they
afterwards learnt what new ingredient had
so astonishingly improved their daily soup,
they had the wisdom to clamour for more
potatoes. Again, in Ireland no one will
eat bullock's liver. And, when men and
women were dying under the hedges of bare
hunger, large casks of salted bullock's liver
were sent from Ireland to England to be
pressed (the pressing yielding a liquor in great
request for certain adulterations), dried in
ovens, pounded, and sent back to Ireland as
snuff. How few, too, of our own poor will
eat rye-bread! In Ireland, it is a social
disgrace to eat rye-bread. Who does not
know also the pestilence of fish manure—
fish manure for potato land? which means
gold and life scattered broadcast to putrify
in the air. Hundreds pining in want and
hunger, might live well and healthfully
on that neglected manure, if they would
but learn the simple art of cooking fish-food
properly; so as to make the most out