literature with pedantry?  Lord Bolingbroke has pointedly said of James I. that “his pedantry was too much even for the age in which he lived.”  His lordship knew little of that glorious age when the founders of our literature flourished.  It had been over-clouded by the French court of Charles II., a race of unprincipled wits, and the revolution-court of William, heated by a new faction, too impatient to discuss those principles of government which they had established.  It was easy to ridicule what they did not always understand, and very rarely met with.  But men of far higher genius than this monarch, Selden, Usher, and Milton, must first be condemned before this odium of pedantry can attach itself to the plain and unostentatious writings of James I., who, it is remarkable, has not scattered in them those oratorical periods, and elaborate fancies, which he indulged in his speeches and proclamations.  These loud accusers of the pedantry of James were little aware that the king has expressed himself with energy and distinctness on this very topic.  His majesty cautions Prince Henry against the use of any “corrupt leide, as book-language, and pen-and-inkhorn termes, and, least of all, nignard and effeminate ones.”  One passage may be given entire as completely refuting a charge so general, yet so unfounded.  “I would also advise you to write in your own language, for there is nothing left to be said in Greek and Latine already; and, ynewe (enough) of poore schollers would match you in these languages; and besides that it best becometh a King, to purifie and make famous his owne tongue; therein he may goe before all his subjects, as it setteth him well to doe in all honest and lawful things.”  No scholar of a pedantic taste could have dared so complete an emancipation from ancient, yet not obsolete prejudices, at a time when many of our own great authors yet imagined there was no fame for an Englishman unless he neglected his maternal language for the artificial labour of the idiom of ancient Rome.  Bacon had even his own domestic Essays translated into Latin; and the king found a courtier-bishop to perform the same task for his majesty’s writings.  There was something prescient in this view of the national language, by the king, who contemplated in it those latent powers which had not yet burst into existence.  It is evident that the line of Pope is false which describes the king as intending to rule “senates and courts” by “turning the council to a grammar-school.”

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HIS POLEMICAL STUDIES.

This censure of the pedantry of James is also connected with those studies of polemical divinity, for which the king has incurred much ridicule from one party, who were not his contemporaries; and such vehement invective from another, who were; who, to their utter dismay, discovered their monarch descending into their theological gymnasium to encounter them with their own weapons.