enemies had left the apartment not to return, James called to those above to take the sheets from the bed, and draw him out of the narrow chamber where he stood. The strength of the queen and her ladies was insufficient to the task; and Elizabeth Douglas, in attempting it, fell down into the vault, whilst the noise occasioned by the accident recalled Thomas Chambers, one of the conspirators, who immediately recollected the small closet beneath the bed-chamber, and traced the sound to that quarter. A moment's inspection showed him the broken plank, and, holding his torch to the place, he saw clearly the king and the unfortunate lady, who had fallen beside him. A savage shout made his companions aware of the discovery; and, calling out that they had found the bride for whom they had sought and carolled all night long, Sir John Hall leapt down with his drawn sword, followed by his brother. James, however, who was an athletic and very powerful man, made a desperate resistance, although unarmed and almost naked. Seizing first Hall, and afterwards his brother, by the throat, he grappled with them in a mortal struggle, and succeeded in throwing both below his feet. Such was the convulsive strength with which they had been handled, that at their execution a month after, the marks of the king's grasp were discernible upon their persons. But in these efforts his hands were dreadfully cut, and his strength exhausted. Sir Robert Graham, at this juncture, rushed into the apartment, and instantly threw himself, with his drawn sword, upon his victim, who earnestly implored his life, though it were at the expense of half his kingdom. But his mortal enemy was deaf to his entreaties. "Thou

cruel tyrant," said he, "thou never hadst compassion on thine own noble kindred: wherefore, expect none now." "At least," said James, "let me have a confessor, for the good of my soul." “None,” cried Graham, "none shalt thou have but this sword." Saying this, he wounded him mortally in the body, and his unhappy victim, exhausted by his former struggles, fell down covered with blood, yet still faintly imploring his life. It is said that, at this moment, even the iron heart of the murderer revolted from the piteous scene, and he was about to come up, leaving the king still breathing, when his companions, who stood above, threatened him with instant death, unless he completed the work. This he at length did, assisted by the two Halls; but so tenacious was the miserable sufferer of life, that he was almost cut to pieces by repeated wounds, before he expired. The whole scene was most shocking, and rather a butchery than a murder. The ruffians now sought anxiously for the queen, but the lengthened resistance of her husband had given her time to escape; and, as the tumult increased in the town, and some of the nobles were seen hastening to the monastery, the conspirators deemed it prudent to retire. They were seen crossing the outer moat, and flying in the direction of the Highlands. One of them only, and he a person of inferior note, was overtaken and slain, but the rest succeeded in burying themselves in the remote fastnesses of Athole.

Here, however, they were not long suffered to remain; and such was the horror and execration with which the accounts of James's death were received throughout the country, and the activity of

the pursuit, that in less than a month all the murderers were taken and executed. Graham, the arch-traitor, who had been a principal contriver and executioner of the whole, maintained his firm and vindictive character to the last-enduring without a murmur the complicated tortures inflicted on him, and not only justifying his conduct, but glorying in his success. He audaciously pleaded before his judges, that, having renounced his allegiance, he could not be accused of treason to a monarch of whom he was no longer a subject; that he had defied the king as his mortal enemy, and had a right to slay him wherever they met, as his feudal equal, without being amenable to any human tribunal. As for the rest, he said, although they might now exhaust their ingenuity in his tortures, the time would soon arrive when they would gratefully acknowledge that his sword had delivered them from a merciless tyrant. These sentiments were no vain or empty boasts. They were uttered in the midst of tortures, at the recital of which humanity shudders-when the flesh of the victim was torn off by burning pincers, and his son, who had been the companion of his crime, was exposed, mangled and dying, before the eyes of his father. The rest of the conspirators, Sir Robert Stewart, Chambers, the two Halls, and Athole, were all executed at the same time. This aged conspirator, who was now on the borders of seventy, although he admitted his knowledge of the plot, denied his being, in any degree, concerned in it.

We have traced the history of James as a captive and as a monarch. It remains to speak of

him as a man of varied and remarkable accomplishments, and, without entering too deeply into antiquarian discussion, to give the general reader some idea of his excellence as a poet, and his endowments as a scholar. In both these respects, the circumstances of his checkered life conferred on him great advantages. His education in Scotland under Wardlaw, his lengthened nurture in England, his repeated residence in France, and the leisure for study and mental cultivation which was given by his tedious imprisonment, were much in his favour; yet, giving full weight to all this, James the First was unquestionably endowed by nature with original genius;-that rare quality of mind, which, had he been a subject instead of a sovereign, would still have marked him for an extraordinary man. As a boy, it is probable he had read and delighted in the works of Barbour;* and we may conjecture that the exploits of the renowned Bruce, the chivalry of the good Sir James, and the counsels, sage and calm, of the great Randolph, cheered many a lonely hour in his confinement at Windsor. From the "Chronicle," too, of the venerable Prior of Lochleven,† with which it is impossible that a mind so eager and inquisitive as his should not have been acquainted, he must have derived, not a bare chronology of the history of his kingdom, but many fresh and romantic pictures, descriptive of the scenery of the period and the manners of a feudal age. But whilst the literature of his own country could furnish him with two such authors, he has himself informed us that his poetical ambition was chiefly kindled by *Life of Barbour, vol. ii. p. 158. + Ibid. p. 173.

the study of Chaucer and Gower, "his maisters dere".

-"that on steppes sate

Of rhetoric, while they were lyvand1 here."

Of Chaucer, a man whose genius, in many of its distinguishing peculiarities, has been yet unrivalled in the history of English literature, it was the highest praise that he created a new style, and clothed it in a new language; that out of the rude and unformed materials of his native tongue, which lay scattered around him, disdained and deserted by the pedantry of the age, he erected a noble and original edifice, full of delightful chambers of imagery, furnished with the living manners and crowded with the breathing figures of his own age, clothed in their native dresses, and speaking their native language.

The same praise, though certainly in an inferior degree, is due to James the First. Although preceded by Barbour and Winton, he is the father of the tender and romantic poetry of Scotland-the purifier and the reformer of the language of his country. His greatest work, the "King's Quhair," or "King's Book," is in no part unworthy of Chaucer, and, not unfrequently, in the delicacy and tenderness of its sentiment, superior even to that master of the shell. "The design, or theme, of this work," says that excellent author, to whose taste and research the literary world is indebted for its first publication, "is the royal poet's love for his beautiful mistress, Jane Beaufort, of whom he became enamoured whilst a prisoner at the castle of Windsor. The recollection of the mis1 living.