What were the painful feelings of Catharine Macaulay, in summing up the character of James the First.  The king has even extorted from her a confession, that “his conduct in Scotland was unexceptionable,” but “despicable in his Britannic government.”  To account for this seeming change in a man who, from his first to his last day, was always the same, required a more sober historian.  She tells us also, he affected “a sententious wit;” but she adds, that it consisted “only of quaint and stale conceits.”  We need not take the word of Mrs. Macaulay, since we have so much of this “sententious wit” recorded, of which probably she knew little.  Forced to confess that James’s education had been “a more learned one than is usually bestowed on princes,” we find how useless it is to educate princes at all; for this “more learned education” made this prince “more than commonly deficient in all the points he pretended to have any knowledge of.”  This incredible result gives no encouragement for a prince; having a Buchanan for his tutor.  Smollett, having compiled the popular accusations of the “vanity, the prejudices, the littleness of soul,” of this abused monarch, surprises one in the same page by discovering enough good qualities to make something more than a tolerable king.  “His reign, though ignoble to himself, was happy to his people, who were enriched by commerce, felt no severe impositions, while they made considerable progress in their liberties.”  So that, on the whole, the nation appears not to have had all the reason they have so fully exercised in deriding and vilifying a sovereign, who had made them prosperous at the price of making himself contemptible!  I shall notice another writer, of an amiable character, as an evidence of the influence of popular prejudice, and the effect of truth.

When James went to Denmark to fetch his queen, he passed part of his time among the learned; but such was his habitual attention in studying the duties of the sovereign, that he closely attended the Danish courts of justice; and Daines Barrington, in his curious “Observations on the Statutes,” mentions, that the king borrowed from the Danish code three statutes for the punishment of criminals.  But so provocative of sarcasm is the ill-used name of this monarch, that our author could not but shrewdly observe, that James “spent more time in those courts than in attending upon his destined consort.”  Yet this is not true:  the king was jovial there, and was as indulgent a husband as he was a father.  Osborne even censures James for once giving marks of his uxoriousness![A] But while Daines Barrington degrades, by unmerited ridicule, the honourable employment of the “British Solomon,” he becomes himself perplexed at the truth that flashes on his eyes.  He expresses the most perfect admiration of James the First, whose statutes he declares “deserve much to be enforced; nor do I find any one which hath the least tendency to extend the prerogative, or abridge