attributed, can hardly be its true explanation. James always found money to spend on Court festivities and pleasures, and to lavish on his extravagant favourites; and one great reason of his being unable to procure more money from his Parliaments was the fact, that he wasted on such objects that which had been already bestowed on him, instead of employing it for the furtherance of a great national policy. In the cause of the Palatine, at any rate, if not in that of their commercial rivals, the Dutch Provinces, the pursestrings of the English people would have been willingly undrawn. I come then to, what must be my last point, the relations between James and his Favourites, and the questionable deaths of Prince Henry and Sir Thomas Overbury. In the case of any one less foolish than James, I must confess that I should be inclined, from the evidence we possess, to draw the most unfavourable inferences as to the nature of the unseemly familiarity which existed between this king and Carr and Villiers. But James had so little idea of dignity and decency of deportment, and was so gross and prurient in his imagination, as distinguished from immorality in act, that I hesitate to decide against him, and even incline to the belief that he was innocent of the deeper charge. As to the death of Prince Henry, if it were not a natural one,―on which point I do not think our evidence enables us to pronounce an absolute opinion, though it seems rather to preponderate against the

poisoning theory-I do not believe that James at the worst can be accused of anything more than perhaps a guilty knowledge or suspicion that something against the life of the Prince had been contemplated, probably in that case by some one who was too dear to him, or too much in his secrets, for him to overcome a cowardly disinclination to interfere. Even this is very doubtful, and nothing but the prying character and strange conduct of James himself would justify me in saying as much as this, even in the case of so suspicious a death. Of the Overbury business I can speak still less decidedly, for it is enveloped in the most perplexing obscurity. It seems to me almost impossible to read the letters of James to the Lieutenant of the Tower, when Somerset gave vent to some threat of what he would do if he were brought to his trial for the murder, without the gravest suspicion that James had some guilty knowledge, if not actual connivance in the affair. No mere political secret seems to be an adequate explanation of his evident terror and consternation. It was clearly something strictly personal in its imputation, the disclosure of which the King so fearfully dreaded; and there is unfortunately nothing in James's private character to place an absolute negative on the unfavourable solution I have hinted at, though there is not anything to make the presumption overpowering.

Such, in the main features of his character, appears

to me to have been James Stuart, one of the weakest, though perhaps not the most worthless, of the Kings who had reigned in England since the days of Henry the Third. Knowing just too much and thinking just too much to be a passive spectator of events, but with far too little either of real knowledge or thoughtfulness to be fit for the direction of any great affair, self-conceited rather than self-confident or selfreliant, a philosopher and a Christian in theory, and a fool and an unscrupulous man in practice, he probably did as little good, though perhaps also as little evil, as any man with such stagnant good intentions and such active inclinations.

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CHARLES THE FIRST.

THE character of Charles Stuart is still the subject of warm controversy, and there is little probability of public opinion becoming unanimous on the question, for his life is not merely the story of the career of an individual sovereign, but the record of a great national struggle, and of the most important era in the civil history of England. Hence, although comparatively few persons are now to be found who will commit themselves to an unreserved panegyric of Charles, there is still so large an amount of sympathy in certain classes of society with the political and religious tendencies which he is supposed to represent, and of dislike to the persons or principles of those by whom he was opposed, as to create a disposition to regard all his actions from a favourable point of view, and to extenuate, if not defend, his most questionable proceedings. Independently, too, of these prepossessions, there is something in the character of Charles, and in the real facts of the case, to mislead a superficial observer, and at first to lend a certain plausibility to the attractive picture of him which the softening influences of time and the imaginations

of his sympathisers have substituted for the real man. Every one is acquainted with the conception of him which is still perhaps the prevalent one in the majority of English drawing-rooms, as a stately English gentleman of the most refined tastes and habits, of highly cultivated mind, deep religious feelings, and the purest morals, who unfortunately entertained-or rather was educated into-notions of absolute authority, which were inconsistent with the predominant spirit of the age, though justified by precedents, and who, after making every concession consistent with right to the exorbitant demands of his rebellious subjects, resisted them by arms in strict self-defence, and more than expiated any errors he had committed in his lifetime by his heroic and saintly bearing on the scaffold. Yet such a representation, in my opinion, can be supported only by the widest deductions from the most imperfect premisses, by a total disregard of all but a few isolated facts, and a violation of all the sequences and natural relations of events. Very different will be the result if, abandoning all vague generalities, we study the man in the realities of his actual life, and allow these to speak for themselves, as we should do in estimating the character and motives of other men. At the same time, the truer portrait may explain the origin of the highly-coloured party tradition.

The best plea in extenuation of any faults in the character of Charles is, that he was the son of such a