Should the prince incline to be an author, the king adds—­

“If your engine (genius) spur you to write any workes, either in prose or verse, I cannot but allow you to practise it; but take no longsome works in hande, for distracting you from your calling.”

He reminds the prince with dignity and truth,

“Your writes (writings) will remain as the true picture of your minde, to all posterities; if yee would write worthelie, chuse subjects worthie of you.”  His critical conception of the nature of poetry is its best definition.  “If ye write in verse, remember that it is not the principal part of a poem to rime right, and flow well with many prettie wordes; but the chief commendation of a poem is, that when the verse shall bee taken sundry in prose, it shall be found so ritch in quick inventions and poetick floures, and in fair and pertinent comparisons, as it shall retain the lustre of a poem although in prose.”

The king proceeds touching many curious points concerning the prince’s bodily exercises and “house-pastimes.”  A genuine picture of the customs and manners of the age:  our royal author had the eye of an observer, and the thoughtfulness of a sage.

The king closes with the hope that the prince’s “natural inclination will have a happie simpathie with these precepts; making the wise man’s schoolmaister, which is the example of others, to be your teacher; and not that overlate repentance by your own experience, which is the schoolmaister of fools.”

Thus have I opened the book, and I believe, the heart of James I. The volume remains a perpetual witness to posterity of the intellectual capacity and the noble disposition of the royal author.

But this monarch has been unfairly reproached both by the political and religious; as far as these aspersions connect themselves with his character, they enter into our inquiry.

His speeches and his writings are perpetually quoted by democratic writers, with the furious zeal of those who are doing the work of a party; they never separate the character of James from his speculative principles of government; and, such is the odium they have raised against him, that this sovereign has received the execration, or the ridicule, even of those who do not belong to their party.  James maintained certain abstract doctrines of the times, and had written on “The Prerogative Royal,” and “The Trew Laws of Free Monarchies,” as he had on witches and devils.  All this verbal despotism is artfully converted into so many acts of despotism itself; and thus they contrive their dramatic exhibition of a blustering tyrant, in the person of a father of his people, who exercised his power without an atom of brutal despotism adhering to it.

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THE KING’S IDEA OF THE ROYAL PREROGATIVE.