volumes with no eye of love.  To free himself of his tutor, Huet, he eagerly consented to an early marriage.  “Now we shall see if Mr. Huet shall any more keep me to ancient geography!” exclaimed the Dauphin, rejoicing in the first act of despotism.  This ingenuous sally, it is said, too deeply affected that learned man for many years afterwards.  Huet’s zealous gentleness (for how could Huet be too rigid?) wanted the art which Buchanan disdained to practise.  But, in the case of the prince of Scotland, a constitutional timidity combining with an ardour for study, and therefore a veneration for his tutor, produced a more remarkable effect.  Such was the terror which the remembrance of this illustrious but inexorable republican left on the imagination of his royal pupil, that even so late as when James was seated on the English throne, once the appearance of his frowning tutor in a dream greatly agitated the king, who in vain attempted to pacify him in this portentous vision.  This extraordinary fact may be found in a manuscript letter of that day.[A]

[Footnote A:  The learned Mede wrote the present letter soon after another, which had not been acknowledged, to his friend Sir M. Stuteville; and the writer is uneasy lest the political secrets of the day might bring the parties into trouble.  It seems he was desirous that letter should be read and then burnt.

“March 31, 1622.

“I hope my letter miscarried not; if it did I am in a sweet pickle.  I desired to hear from you of the receipt and extinction of it.  Though there is no danger in my letters whilst report is so rife, yet when it is forgotten they will not be so safe; but your danger is as great as mine—­

“Mr. Downham was with we, now come from London.  He told me that it was three years ago since those verses were delivered to the king in a dream, by his Master Buchanan, who seemed to check him severely, as he used to do; and his Majesty, in his dream, seemed desirous to pacify him, but he, turning away with a frowning countenance, would utter those verses, which his Majesty, perfectly remembering, repeated the next day, and many took notice of them.  Now, by occasion of the late soreness in his arm, and the doubtfulness what it would prove; especially having, by mischance, fallen into the fire with that arm, the remembrance of the verses began to trouble him.”

It appears that these verses were of a threatening nature, since, in a melancholy fit, they were recalled to recollection after an interval of three years; the verses are lost to us, with the letter which contained them.]

James, even by the confession of his bitter satirist, Francis Osborne, “dedicated rainy weather to his standish, and fair to his hounds.”  His life had the uniformity of a student’s; but the regulated life of a learned monarch must have weighed down the gay and dissipated with the deadliest monotony.  Hence one of these courtiers declared that, if he were to awake after a sleep of seven years’ continuance, he would undertake to enumerate the whole of his Majesty’s occupations, and every dish that had been placed on the table during the interval.  But this courtier was not aware that the monotony which the king occasioned him was not so much in the king himself as in his own volatile spirit.