be kept in the country, if they be broken at your eare!—­Bee homelie or strange with them, as ye think their behaviour deserveth and their nature may bear ill.—­Employ every man as ye think him qualified, but use not one in all things, lest he wax proud, and be envied by his fellows.—­As for the other sort of your companie and servants, they ought to be of perfect age, see they be of a good fame; otherwise what can the people think but that ye have chosen a companion unto you according to your own humour, and so have preferred those men for the love of their vices and crimes, that ye knew them to be guiltie of.  For the people, that see you not within, cannot judge of you but according to the outward appearance of your actions and company, which only is subject to their sight.”

* * * * *

THE REVOLUTIONISTS OF THAT AGE.

James I. has painted, with vivid touches, the Anti-Monarchists, or revolutionists, of his time.

He describes “their imagined democracie, where they fed themselves with the hope to become tribuni plebi; and so, in a popular government, by leading the people by the nose, to bear the sway of all the rule.—­Every faction,” he adds, “always joined them.  I was ofttimes calumniated in their popular sermons, not for any evill or vice in me,[A] but because I was a king, which they thought the highest evill; and, because they were ashamed to professe this quarrel, they were busie to look narrowly in all my actions, pretending to distinguish the lawfulness of the office from the vice of the person; yet some of them would snapper out well grossly with the trewth of their intentions, informing the people that all kings and princes were naturally enemies to the liberties of the Church; whereby the ignorant were emboldened (as bayards),[B] to cry the learned and modest out of it:  but their parity is the mother of confusion, and enemie to vnitie, which is the mother of order.”  And it is not without eloquence his Majesty describes these factious Anti-Monarchists, as “Men, whom no deserts can oblige, neither oaths nor promises bind; breathing nothing but sedition and calumnies, aspiring without measure, railing without reason, and making their own imaginations the square of their conscience.  I protest, before the great God, and, since I am here as vpon my testament, it is no place for me to lie in, that ye shall never find with any Hie-land, or Border theeves, greater ingratitude, and more lies and vile perjuries:  ye may keep them for trying your patience, as Socrates did an evill wife.”

[Footnote A:  The conduct of James I. in Scotland has even extorted praise from one of his bitterest calumniators; for Mrs. Macaulay has said—­“His conduct, when King of Scotland, was in many points unexceptionable.”]

[Footnote B:  An old French word, expressing, “A man that gapes or gazes earnestly at a thing; a fly-catcher; a greedy and unmannerly beholder.”—­ COTGRAVE.]