after this preface was fairly read, one would like to learn; but here we have the age! One work by this royal author must not pass away with the others; it is not only stamped with the idiosyncracy of the author, but it is one of those original effusions which are precious to the history of man. "The Basilicon Doron, or His Majesty's Instructions to His Dearest Son Henry the Prince," is a genuine composition in the vernacular idiom; not the prescribed labor of a secretary, nor the artificial composition of the salaried literary man, but warm with the personal emotions of the royal author. He writes for the Prince of Scotland, and about the Scottish people; he instructs the prince even by his own errors and misfortunes. Some might be surprised to find the king strenuously warning the prince against pedantry; exhorting his pupil to avoid what he calls any "corrupt leide, as book-language and pen-and-ink terms;" counselling him to write in his own language, "for it best becometh a king to purify and make famous his own tongue." To have ventured on so complete an emancipation from the prevalent prejudices, in the creation of a vernacular literature, is one evidence, among many, that this royal author was not a mere pedant; and the truth is, that his writings on popular subjects are colloquially unostentatious; abstaining from those oratorical periods and rhetorical fancies which the scholar indulged in his speeches and proclamations—the more solemn labors of his own hand. It is due to the literary character of James the First to notice his prompt sympathies with the productions of genius. This monarch had not exceeded his twentieth year when we find him in an intercourse with men of letters and science at home and abroad. The death of Sidney called forth an elegiac poem, and the works of the astronomer Tycho Brahe are adorned by a poetical tribute from the royal hand; during the winter the king passed in Denmark he was a frequent visiter of the philosopher, on whom he conferred an honor and a privilege. That he addressed a letter to Shakespeare, grateful for the compliments received in "Macbeth," there is little reason to doubt; for Davenant, the possessor of the letter, which was finally lost, told it to the Duke of Buckingham; few traditions are so clearly traced to their source; and indeed some mark of James's attention to Shakespeare is positively told by Ben Jonson in his elegy on "The Swan of Avon" "What a sight it were, To see thee on our waters yet appear; And make those flights upon the banks of Thames, Hooker was the favorite vernacular author of James; and his earliest inquiry, on his arrival in England, was after Hooker, whose death he deeply regretted. James wrote a congratulatory letter to Lord Bacon on his great work; the king at least bowed to the genius of the man. It was by the especial command of this royal "pedant," twenty-four years after the publication of Fairfax's "Tasso," that a second edition revived that version; and he provided Herbert, the poet, with a sinecure or pension, that his muse might cease to be disturbed. James the First was not only the patron of Ben Jonson, but admitted the bard to a literary intercourse; and it is probable that we owe to those conferences some of the splendor of the Masques, and in which there are many strokes of the familiar acquaintance of the poet with his royal admirer. More grave and Every atom of candor is to be grudged to this hapless monarch; it is lamentable to see such a writer as Mr Hallam prompt instantly to confirm a mere suggestion of Mr. Collier, that James could never have written a letter to Shakespeare, incapacitated to sympathize with the genial effusions of our poet. important objects sometimes engaged his attention. It was James the First who assigned to the learned Usher the task of unfolding the antiquities of the British churches; and it was under the protection of this monarch that Father Paul composed the famous history, which, as fast as it was written, was despatched to England by our ambassador, Sir Henry Wotten; and, in this country, this great history was first published. These are not the only testimonials of his strong affection for literature and literary men; but they may surprise some who only hear of a pedantking, who in reality was only a "learned" one. 370 THE AGE OF DOCTRINES. WE now leave the age of Imagination for the age of Doctrines; we have entered into another reign; and a new epoch arises in our literature, our tastes, and our manners. We turn from the noble wrestlings of power, the stirrings of adventure, and the commanding genius of the Maiden Queen, to the uninterrupted level of a long protracted tranquillity; a fat soil, where all flourished to the eye, while it grew into rankness, and an atmosphere of corruption, breeding in its unnatural heat, clouds of insects. A monarch arrived in the flush of new dominion with a small people, who, as an honest soul among them said, "having been forty years in the desert, were rushing to take possession of the promised land." All was to be the festival of an unbroken repose a court of shows and sports, the rejoicings of three kingdoms. But the queen, with these dominions, had bequeathed her successor two troublesome legacies, in two redoubtable portions of the English public; both the Romanists, and those numerous dissenters, emphatically called puritans, were looking up to the new monarch, while the "true protestant of Elizabeth" closed not their eyes in watchfulness over both papist and presbyter. To the monarch from the kirk of Scotland, which he had extolled for "the sincerest kirk in the world," as suited a Scottish sovereign, and who had once glanced with a presbyter's eye on "an evil mass in England," the English bishops hastened to offer the loyalty of their church. His more ancient acquaintance, the puritans, were not behind the bishops, nor without hope, to settle what they held to be "the purity" of church discipline; but James had drunk large draughts of a Scottish presbytery, and knew what lay at the bottom-he had tasted the dregs. He did not like the puritans, and he told them why; to unking and to unbishop was "the parity" of their petty model of Geneva. The new monarch declared, perhaps he would not otherwise have been received, that "he came to maintain what the queen had established," he demanded from the puritans, conformity to the state, and probably little imagined that they preferred martyrdom. James lived to see the day when silencing, ejecting, and expatiating, ended in no other conformity than the common sufferings of the party.* The claims of the Romanist were more tender than those of the sons of John Knox, they prayed only for a toleration. The monarch delayed what he dared not concede. He is charged by the non-conformist with being " very charitable" to these votaries of an indefeasible right of monarchy, and his project of "meeting them half-way" startled the English protestant. What does the king mean? Are our doctrines the same? are we to return to the confessional? purchase plenary pardons require absolution and the salvation of souls from the bishop of Rome? The main objection of the king himself to what he styled "the corruption of the mother-church," was the papal supremacy, and its pretended power of deposing monarchs, or of granting a dispensation for their murder. Here the popular patriot exclaimed, "was the great revolution of civil liberty made only for the prince's safety ?" Whatever might be this revery of a coalition with Rome, Rome for ever baffled, by the never-ceasing principle of her one and indivisible for * James granted to the Puritans the public discussion then prayed the famous conference at Hampton Court. |
