SOURCE: Rait, Robert S. Introduction to A Royal Rhetorician: A Treatise on Scottis Poesie, A Counterblaste to Tobacco, etc. etc. by King James VI and I, edited by Robert S. Rait, pp. ix-xlvii. Westminster: A. Constable and Co., 1900.

In the following essay, Rait offers an overview of King James's literary, political, and theological works.

‘Your Inheritance consists as much in the workes of your Father's Royall Vertues, as in the wealth of his mighty Kingdomes.’ So wrote the courtier Bishop of Winchester in his ‘Epistle Dedicatorie to the Thrice Illustrious and most Excellent Prince, Charles, the Onely Sonne of Our Soveraigne Lord the King’—an epistle prefixed to the Bishop's edition of King James's Works, published in 1616. The goodly folio¹ volume of some six hundred pages may have seemed to the prelate and his master to justify the compliment, or the sentence may have served for taking up...