making one in a brilliant gathering of
attendants grouped about the dais in the
bauqueting-chamber of Whitehall. His
Majesty Jamie the Sixth of Scotland, James
the First of England, according to kingly
wont in those days, holds high revel,
comparatively in public, in the presence of his
lieges. A customary royal dinner this is, in
the mere manner of it; but, in the curious
converse it elicits, one in many ways really
extraordinary. A contest of gibe and
repartee faithfully recorded upon our national
annals by every subsequent historian. A
wit-combat between the anointed clown
there, slobbering over the gold dishes (with
the juices of the food he masticates, running
in unseemly fashion out of the corners of his
ungainly mouth upon his dribbled beard),
and sundry of the guests at his regal board,
right honourables and right reverends. It is
not the babble of king and bishops, however,
I am now watchfully observing; it is rather
the shrewd listening face of one spare and
delicate youth, easily discernible among the
bystanders. The countenance of Waller at
sixteen, as Aubrey has described it: with a
"fair thin skin; his hair, frizzed, of a brownish
colour; full eye, popping out and working;
his face somewhat of an olivaster"—Waller,
in short, as he was, before he saw that
"sleepy eye" that spoke, for him at least,
anything but the "melting soul:" the
Ianguishing glance of the blonde and voluptuous
Sacharissa. Not, however, now to the damask
cheek of beauty or to the chiming cadence of
her silver voice are Waller's senses wakened,
as I observe him leaning by the gorgeous
buffet of Whitehall. Rather than that,
they are fixed meditatively upon the drivelling
of the Grotesque yonder, lolling in the
state chair and spluttering over the crisp
ruff and the jewels of sovereignty—that
farcical pedant-king, whose incongruous reign
is, as it were, nothing better than a fantastic
burlesque between two bloody and affecting
tragedies. A laughable interlude played out
upon the great stage of history by a low
comedian, the very type of the king of
extravaganzas; by one whose offspring and successor
was nevertheless afterwards to die upon a
scaffold outside that very banquet-hall; whose
own immediate progenitors were already
prematurely slain, the one by the headsman's axe,
the other by the hand of the midnight assassin.
This gobbling farçeur, however, talking
perilous nonsense, now in sixteen hundred
and twenty-one, to two of the lords spiritual
of his realm—sire and son, midway between
destinies so evil doomed—has no relish whatever
taken from the viands upon his platter
by the shadowy ghosts of two grimly
memories, or by the spectral phantom of one
momentary presentiment. Guttling his food
with a zest, the King plays the fool according
to habit in his accustomed though
unconscious capacity as his own jester, what time
Mr. Edmund Waller—the down not yet upon
his lips—toys with the tassel of his orange
doublet and hearkens sagaciously.

STEP THE SEVENTH. A.D. 1566.

IN a twinkling I have strode, at a single
pace, forty-five years further onward into
the past, and am peering curiously, upon a
summer's day of fifteen hundred and sixty-
six, through a tapestried porch of an ante-
room into a sleeping-chamber in what was,
even then, the time-worn and war-worn
Castle of Edinburgh. James Stuart has
happily not yet developed from the baby-
prince into the full-grown kingly punchinello.
He is indeed but newly-born, having first
opened his eyes to the light on the
nineteenth of June, only a few days previously.
The apartment—since screened off into a
very cupboard, and displayed thus to wondering
sight-seers as the birthplace of the first
sovereign of the United Kingdom of England
and Scotland—presents to view, as I gaze
into it, a domestic group, pathetic in its way,
and singularly beautiful. The handsome
and youthful ne'er-do-weel, Henry, the Lord
Darnley, King (consort) of Scots—sullen and
passionate by turns, through all his wayward
married life—has unexpectedly come to visit
his queen-wife during one brief lucid interval
of compunction: apparently intent only upon
consoling her under the depressing influence
of her recent pangs by this unwonted evidence
of tenderness: in reality eager to see with
his own eyes and hold within his own arms
the offspring of their ill-fated nuptials. A
contemporary chronicler tells full sadly the
tale of the notable interview with its slight
but touching incidents—how Mary, lovelier
than ever in her maternal prostration, her
delicate complexion flushing as she spoke,
swore a great oath as to the child's legitimacy,
calling God to witness the truth of her
asseveration: her eyes of witchery in a blaze,
her fair right hand pointing stedfastly from
her couch to Heaven! How Darnley, thrilling
to the words then uttered, yearned over the
little infant he held at the moment in his
arms, as he sat by the bedside, and bending
down, kissed it tenderly upon the forehead.

STEP THE EIGHTH. A.D. 1542.

FOLLOWING a very natural sequence of
recollections, I pass, still as from stepping-stone
to stepping-stone, across an interval of some
four-and-twenty years, from the birthplace of
James to that of his young mother, the radiant
and unfortunate Queen of Scots; pausing
upon the eighth of December, fifteen
hundred and forty-two, at the door of another
royal bedchamber: the room in which the
thrice-widowed Mary began her woful life of
love in the palace of Linlithgow. Here in
truth. at last—pausing! For, the date alone
without one syllable of illustrative comment,
is of itself, indeed, sufficiently suggestive.
Suggestive—how suggestive! of the first tender
budding of the beautiful passion-flower,