It was then the mode, when the king or the prince travelled, to sleep with their suite at the houses of the nobility; and the loyalty and zeal of the host were usually displayed in the reception given to the royal guest.  It happened that in one of these excursions the prince’s servants complained that they had been obliged to go to bed supperless, through the pinching parsimony of the house, which the little prince at the time of hearing seemed to take no great notice of.  The next morning the lady of the house coming to pay her respects to him, she found him turning over a volume that had many pictures in it; one of which was a painting of a company sitting at a banquet:  this he showed her.  “I invite you, madam, to a feast.”  “To what feast?” she asked.  “To this feast,” said the boy.  “What! would your highness give me but a painted feast?” Fixing his eye on her, he said, “No better, madam, is found in this house.”  There was a delicacy and greatness of spirit in this ingenious reprimand far excelling the wit of a child.

According to this anecdote-writer, it appears that James the First probably did not delight in the martial dispositions of his son, whose habits and opinions were, in all respects, forming themselves opposite to his own tranquil and literary character.  The writer says, that “his majesty, with the tokens of love to him, would sometimes interlace sharp speeches, and other demonstrations of fatherly severity.”  Henry, who however lived, though he died early, to become a patron of ingenious men, and a lover of genius, was himself at least as much enamoured of the pike as of the pen.  The king, to rouse him to study, told him, that if he did not apply more diligently to his book, his brother, duke Charles, who seemed already attached to study, would prove more able for government and for the cabinet, and that himself would be only fit for field exercises and military affairs.  To his father, the little prince made no reply; but when his tutor one day reminded him of what his father had said, to stimulate our young prince to literary diligence, Henry asked, whether he thought his brother would prove so good a scholar.  His tutor replied that he was likely to prove so.  ‘Then,’ rejoined our little prince, ’will I make Charles Archbishop of Canterbury.’”

Our Henry was devoutly pious, and rigid in never permitting before him any licentious language or manners.  It is well known that James the First had a habit of swearing,—­expletives in conversation, which, in truth, only expressed the warmth of his feelings; but in that age, when Puritanism had already possessed half the nation, an oath was considered as nothing short of blasphemy.  Henry once made a keen allusion to this verbal frailty of his father’s; for when he was told that some hawks were to be sent to him, but it was thought that the king would intercept some of them, he replied, “He may do as he pleases, for he shall not be put to the oath for the matter.”  The king once asking him what were the best verses he had learned in the first book of Virgil, Henry answered, “These:—­