[Footnote B:  Horace Walpole’s character of James I., in his “Royal Authors,” is as remarkable as his character of Sir Philip Sidney; he might have written both without any acquaintance with the works he has so maliciously criticised.  In his account of Sidney he had silently passed over the “Defence of Poetry;” and in his second edition he makes this insolent avowal, that “he had forgotten it; a proof that I at least did not think it sufficient foundation for so high a character as he acquired.”  Every reader of taste knows the falseness of the criticism, and how heartless the polished cynicism that could dare it.  I repeat, what I have elsewhere said, that Horace Walpole had something in his composition more predominant than his wit, a cold, unfeeling disposition, which contemned all literary men, at the moment his heart secretly panted to partake of their fame.

Nothing can be more imposing than his volatile and caustic criticisms on the works of James I.; yet it appears to me that he had never opened that folio volume he so poignantly ridicules.  For he doubts whether these two pieces, “The Prince’s Cabala” and “The Duty of a King in his Royal Office,” were genuine productions of James I. The truth is, they are both nothing more than extracts printed with those separate titles, drawn from the King’s “Basilicon Doron.”  He had probably neither read the extracts nor the original.  Thus singularity of opinion, vivacity of ridicule, and polished epigrams in prose, were the means by which this noble writer startled the world by his paradoxes, and at length lived to be mortified at a reputation which he sported with and lost.  I refer the reader to those extracts from his MS. letters which are in “Calamities of Authors,” where he has made his literary confessions, and performs his act of penance.]

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THE PEDANTRY OF JAMES THE FIRST.

Few of my readers, I suspect, but have long been persuaded that James I. was a mere college pedant, and that all his works, whatever they maybe, are monstrous pedantic labours.  Yet this monarch of all things detested pedantry, either as it shows itself in the mere form of Greek and Latin, or in ostentatious book-learning, or in the affectation of words of remote signification:  these are the only points of view in which I have been taught to consider the meaning of the term pedantry, which is very indefinite, and always a relative one.

The age of James I. was a controversial age, of unsettled opinions and contested principles; an age, in which authority was considered as stronger than opinion; but the vigour of that age of genius was infused into their writings, and those citers, who thus perpetually crowded their margins, were profound and original thinkers.  When the learning of a preceding age becomes less recondite, and those principles general which were at first peculiar, are the ungrateful heirs of all this knowledge to reproach the fathers of their