In another letter, Coke appears with greater dignity.  When Lord Arundel was sent by the king to Coke, a prisoner in the Tower, to inform him that his Majesty would allow him to consult with eight of the best learned in the law to advise him for his cause, Coke thanked the king, but he knew himself to be accounted to have as much skill in the law as any man in England, and therefore needed no such help, nor feared to be judged by the law.  He knew his Majesty might easily find, in such a one as he, whereby to take away his head; but for this he feared not what could be said.

“I have heard you affirm,” said Lord Arundel, “that by law, he that should go about to withdraw the subjects’ hearts from their king was a traitor.”  Sir Edward answered, “That he held him an arch-traitor.”

James I. said of Coke, “That he had so many shifts that, throw him where you would, he still fell upon his legs.”

This affair ended with putting Sir Edward Coke on his knees before the council-table, with an order to retire to a private life, to correct his book of Reports, and occasionally to consult the king himself.  This part of Coke’s history is fully opened in Mr. Alexander Chalmers’s “Biographical Dictionary.”]

* * * * *

THE KING’S ELEVATED CONCEPTION OF THE KINGLY CHARACTER.

But what were the real thoughts and feelings of this presumed despot concerning the duties of a sovereign?  His Platonic conceptions inspired the most exalted feelings; but his gentle nature never led to one act of unfeeling despotism.  His sceptre was wreathed with the roses of his fancy:  the iron of arbitrary power only struck into the heart in the succeeding reign.  James only menaced with an abstract notion; or, in anger, with his own hand would tear out a protestation from the journals of the Commons:  and, when he considered a man as past forgiveness, he condemned him to a slight imprisonment; or removed him to a distant employment; or, if an author, like Coke and Cowell, sent him into retirement to correct his works.

In a great court of judicature, when the interference of the royal authority was ardently solicited, the magnanimous monarch replied:—­

“Kings ruled by their laws, as God did by the laws of nature; and ought as rarely to put in use their supreme authority as God does his power of working miracles.”

Notwithstanding his abstract principles, his knowledge and reflection showed him that there is a crisis in monarchies and a period in empires; and in discriminating between a king and a tyrant, he tells the prince—­

“A tyranne’s miserable and infamous life armeth in end his own subjects to become his burreaux; and although this rebellion be ever unlawful on their part, yet is the world so wearied of him, that his fall is little meaned (minded) by the rest of his subjects, and smiled at by his neighbours.”

And he desires that the prince, his son, should so perform his royal duties, that, “In case ye fall in the highway, yet it should be with the honourable report and just regret of all honest men.”  In the dedicatory sonnet to Prince Henry of the “Basilicon Doron,” in verses not without elevation, James admonishes the prince to