WALDID› SELECT CIRCULATING LIBRARY, PART I. AND JOURNAL OF POLITE LITERATURE, INCLUDING MEMOIRS, BIOGRAPHY, NOVELS, TALES, TRAVELS, VOYAGES, &c. Professor of Classics in the Central High School, Philadelphia; Author of the "American in Paris," &c. PHILADELPHIA, JANUARY 6, 1841. PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY ADAM WALDIE & CO. No. 46 CARPENTER STREET, PhiladelphIA. $5 for 60 numbers, payable in advance. JOURNAL. In accordance with the annunciation made a ing the works we shall republish of every word Experience has shown that the Library can The means, the inclination, and the leisure, The object of the Library is chiefly to impart move. As a favourite object is to obtain-may we NO. 1. which will be read with greater satisfaction than Finally, the punctuality in issuing each num- JESSE'S MEMOIRS. We shall be obliged to retrench something The a chapter for the Archbishop of Canterbury, whose literary accomplishments and productions instead, a monthly number containing the Journal A typographical improvement has been made A chivalric exploits, and killed his man in a duel, The second series includes the Protectorate, or nail, but walked forth more the care of love | the present and preceding ages. "Helas! avec tant d'attraits precieux, Qui n'eut été friponne?" Lady Denham, too!-Sir John wrote Cooper's Hill, and married Miss Brook. He should have married Miss Brook first. Vain man at seventy! who hoped to reign in a heart of eighteen, and be exempt from the general calamity. Poor Denham! thou wert cut off in the flower of age and beauty, leaving a heart-broken and jealous husband to deplore thy loss-not without the reputation of having poisoned his wife. And the Duchess of Portsmouth, the little French bribe, who was given by Louis with 200,000 francs a year to "settle popery in England." The tall, slim, erect, and graceful form of Stewart, who without art by the sole dint of looking pretty, supplanted Castlemaine lived in the very air of Cyprus, and kept herself (they say) almost honest for her legitimate lord, the Duke of Richmond. She on the left, of the same height and grace, and a face replete with sense and beauty, in spite of her little eyes and turn-up nose, is Hamilton, Countess of Grammont. And she next? The orange girl, the rival of Portsmouth, (le roi m'aime autant que sa Portsmouth-Nell,) of such impassioned and benevolent beauty-one wishes to call her Eleanor-it is Nell Gwynn! Anne Hyde, the tall and stately Clarendon's daughter, mistress and duchess of York, and mother of two queens, overlooks the whole. To her we owe this little court. It This compari-crite and buffoon, and getting drunk and swear. son seems much in our favour as regards several ing habitually; otherwise, a very unexceptionof the commandments, and notably the fourth. able person, having an almost Judaical antipathy King James, by his royal edict, ordered that his to pigs and a pious horror of tobacco. Jesse subjects should be indulged in dancing, archery, attempts to vindicate him from the charge of leaping, vaulting, May-games, and Morris dances pedantry. It is certain that he learned at school on Sunday. This Jesse calls shedding "a gleam more than the quantity of Latin usually adminis of sunshine upon the broad shadows of human tered to kings, and that he took for his model wretchedness.' In the last reign but two, Lady Solomon, whom he followed with great emulaHuntingdon's daughter could not hold her office tion. Whether he had a head properly timbered in the bed-chamber, for, being a Methodist, she for Latin or other learning, will be best ascerwas averse to playing cards with the princessestained from the actions of his life. on Sunday. We have the advantage, too, (who would think it?) on the score of cleanliness. The Countess of Dorset says, on quitting the palace of James, she found herself infested (not with bugs) with a vermin "scarcely considered delicate to mention;" and in the succeeding reign, Pepys, who kept a journal, writes as follows, under February 12th, "Up, finding the beds good, only-only infested with the vermin whose very name is now considered indelicate." Sydney Smith says, in the face of Erasmus, that "no English gentleman has spat upon the floor since the Heptarchy;" and English gentlemen, when they visit us now-a-days, are disgusted at not finding French cooks, and other epicurean delicacies, even beyond the Alleghany. Revels and compotations, also, of the higher classes at least, have undergone a salutary change. Jesse has signalised James's revels, and Pepys speaks thus of Charles II.:-"Let us drink the king's health, said some one. Why let us, said the king. Nay, you must do it on your knees. So he did, and so did all the company; and having done it, they all fell a crying for joy, and kissing one another-the king the Duke of York, and the Duke of York the king, was she who commissioned Lely to snatch these and in such a maudlin pickle as never people Such works as this are to be counted amongst the luxuries of literature. It is delightful, in these days of improved steamboats and universal travel, to go back into the past ages for novelty; for what is so little new now-a-days as the "latest news," a day old? Such works, too, relieve the reader from the toil of research, and bring into view what many a one would never have sought in the grim looking tomes in which it is shelved only for the profound scholar. Who is going to wade through the collections of Rushworth, Ludlow, Clarendon, or Walker?-surely not that perpetual man of business, the American. Our encyclopedical list of studies is too extensive for even antediluvian longevity; and what is to be done by one of us frail and ephemeral beings, who is outlived by a beetle? One of the advantages of this book, is the comparison it enables us to institute, in many particulars, between the new world and the old, and between At present, In reading the Protectorate, to observe the change from Puritanism to the merry times of Charles, is a curious speculation. For a long time, laughing seemed to be a modulation of face to which the English muscles were entirely disused. That they were thus suddenly relaxed, is a phenomenon in physics, if not in morals. nesses. 66 All authorities-romance and history-work together unmercifully to the prejudice of James. Every one knows the indignant manner in which Hume breaks from the enumeration of his weakHistory charges itself willingly with a relation of the great crimes, and still more with that of the great virtues, of mankind; but she appears to fall from her dignity, when necessitated to dwell on such frivolous events and ignoble personages." And so he gives up the pedantry, self-conceit, the puns, the quirks, and solemn trifling of James to the writers of memoirs. In the work before us, he is treated as indolent, a spendthrift, egregiously vain, a hypo If kings were remarkably great and good men, republicanism would go out of fashion. Buttyrants apart-when you have read of Charles the Bald, and Charles the Fat, and Charles the Simple, their story is told. A man of even tolerable merit, such as Henry IV., passes among kings for a sort of miracle. Temples are built, and incense is burnt upon his altars. The best advocates of democracy, after all, are kings. This opinion is uttered from no spite at nobility or monarchy. Such a sentiment is not necessary to the preservation of the republic. At least the Romans, who would as lief see his Satanic majesty rule at Rome as a king, were not the more preserved for their royal antipathies. A man of good taste will no more wish the monarchy of England, with its machinery of nobles, banished from their island, than the gods and goddesses from the Iliad or Odyssey. Kings are good things, if only to make novels out of. One likes to be vexed at refined and dignified distresses, and to laugh at the expense of one's betters. Walter Scott has turned both James and his successor in this way to good account. The style of Jesse's book is correct, harmo nious, and sometimes elegant; but rather aiming at the dignity of history, than the easier graces of the memoir. He has said nothing new, and is not always correct in his anecdote. He sometimes takes "Pierre pour Thomas." An observation made by Queen Elizabeth to Nicholas Bacon about his villa, is applied to Francis; and at page 220, Vol. II, he says, “Richelieu, however, triumphed over his rival, though Buckingham did not live to see it. After the death of her husband, Louis the Thirteenth, the queen united herself to the cardinal, his sacerdotal habit, as he had never taken priest's orders, proving no obstacle to their union. Richelieu soon grew tired of her, and treated her unkindly." Now the fact is, that the cardinal died December 4th, 1642, and Louis in the following May, 1643, in consequence of which, the cardinal did not marry the widow, and being dead, did not treat her unkindly. There is a charm about memoirs which no other species of writing possesses, so fond is the world of tittle-tattle. A language follows the genius and habits of the people who speak it. The French are the only truly social people, and of all the world, the only people who can talk, write letters, and make anas, vaudevilles, and memoirs. We call to witness, Froissart, Memoirs of the Court of England the court, some slight compensation may be found It is a fact, which cannot have escaped observation, that while French Literature abounds with private memoirs and personal anecdote, our own is deplorably deficient in agreeable chronicles of this nature. To the author, or rather compiler, of this work, the want appeared to be less owing to the absence of materials, than to a requisite diligence in bringing them to light; in a word, that there existed a supply of latent stores in our own language (buried, as it were, among voluminous records and forgotten pamphlets) sufficient to form a succinct social history of distinguished characters, who figure more or less in every por tion of our annals. for the absence of more important events. The peaceable career of James, and his unwarlike character, are the more remarkable, when we reflect on the eventful history of the unhappy and turbulent race from whence he sprang. With the Stuarts, misfortune had been hereditary. For six generations, his immediate ancestors, with the single exception of a broken heart, had met with violent and untimely ends. His mother had suffered on the scaffold, and his father fell by the hand of an assassin; and it is singular that James should have stood between two crowned heads, his mother and his heir, who times of the sovereign suffering by the hands of were the first and almost only instances in modern the executioner. Providence had conferred a peculiar blessing on It would appear indeed as if the peace-maker. His ancestors, fond of war and familiar with bloodshed, had with difficulty retained possession of their birthrights, while James, who even shuddered at the sight of a drawn sword, became master of a kingdom threefold the value of his inheritance. We must remember, however, that in James the love of peace was less the effect of principle than of constitutional infirmity. With this view of the subject, it occurred to to the author that the private history of the Reigns of the Stuarts and of the Protectorate,their families, and others intimately connected The slight differences which occurred during with the Court, would present a series of this reign to ruffle the quiet tenor of public feelagreeable and instructive anecdotes; would fur-ing, arose almost entirely from subjects of a relinish the means of introducing the reader to the gious or parliamentary nature. It was solely the principal personages of their day, and of exhibit- fault of James that his career at home was not in ing the monarch and the statesman in their un- every respect as peaceable as it was abroad. His dress; while, at the same time, it would afford endeavours to encroach on public liberty caused, an insight into human character, and a picture of in a great degree, the opposition of his parliathe manners of the age. ment: his attempts to conciliate all parties, in matters of religion, ended in his satisfying none. The great source of interest which his reign produces, is derived from the gradual advances which were effected in parliamentary liberty. With little to engage their attention abroad, the Commons began to be jealous of their privileges, and the nation at large of its rights; these are the circumstances which throw a peculiar, and almost the sole political interest over the reign of James. It is as curious as it is instructive to watch the birth of that spark, which burst forth in the wild rage for liberty in the succeeding reign. James. had really less of the despot in him than Elizabeth; but the nation could bear the golden chains of the one, while it contemned the clumsy fetters of the other. It could not escape the author, that some of the anecdotes contained in the present volumes, have already appeared in more than one popular work of modern date. But it would have been impossible for him to follow out his intended plan, and to give a complete and distinct form to his sketches, without partially treading in the footsteps of other writers; in those instances, however, where he has been compelled to make use of the same materials, his researches, whenever it was practicable, have been extended to the fountain-head. The author now ventures to put forth the present volumes as a portion only of his labours. Should others agree with him in thinking that a work like the present has, in any degree supplied a desideratum in our literature, he will consider himself fully repaid for the trouble it has cost him; at the same time, he is free to confess that he would have been as well pleased, had the task fallen into abler hands. James the First was born in Edinburgh castle, 19th June, 1566. The apartment in which he first saw the light was, within the last few years, and probably still is, a guard-room for soldiers. In those who are influenced by local associations, that apartment must still excite no slight degree of interest; less, perhaps, as the birthplace of James, than as being identified with the sorrows of Mary Stuart. The clouds of misfortune had gathered fast around that beautiful but imprudent woman. She had irretrievably disgusted her nobility by her impolitic preference of the arrogant Italian Rizzio, and her people by her open exercise of the Romish faith; her misunderstandings with her husband, the weak and showy Lord Darnley, had produced positive hatred and conseqent misery on both sides. The ministers of the Puritan or Reformed Church, were daily in truding their conscientious brutality in her presence, or promulgating their rebellious tenets among her subjects; and, within a very short period, the blood of her favourite servant Rizzio had been actually shed before her face,—a remarkable scene of violence, when we consider that her own husband, who ought to have been the first to cherish the wife who was shortly to become a mother, and the Lord Chancellor, who should have been foremost to protect the laws and the person of his queen, were the principal actors in that detestable outrage. ly anxious to baptise the heir to the throne, acThe queen and the Puritan clergy were equalfaiths. An assembly of the church, which hapcording to the ceremonials of their respective pened to be convened at Edinburgh at the time, mother, expressed their great solicitude on the while they sent to congratulate the unfortunate subject. The superintendent of Lothian, a man of a milder nature than his fellows, was their deleher usual sweetness, but returned no answer as gate on the occasion. Mary received him with regarded the principal object of his mission. She sent, however, for the royal infant in order to introduce the superintendent to his future king. The minister fell on his knees and breathed a short prayer for his welfare; he then took the babe in his arms and playfully told him to say amen for himself, which the queen, says Archbishop Spotswood, "took in such good part as continually afterwards to call the superintendent her Amen." This story, in after life, was repeated to James, who, from that period, always addressed the superintendent by the same familiar name.* Immediately after the birth of the prince, Sir James Melvil was despatched by Mary to convey the intelligence to her sister, the Queen of England. The account which Melvil gives of this mission is perhaps the most amusing part of his memoirs. Elizabeth was in high spirits, enjoying herself at a ball at Greenwich, when the event was announced to her. Notwithstanding her habitual self-command, and the fact that the possibility of such an event must have been long a source of anxiety, the jealous feelings of the woman prevailed, and her chagrin was but too evident. The dancing instantly ceased, and the queen sat down in her chair, leaning her head upon her hand, and remaining for some time speechless. "The Queen of Scots," she said to one of her ladies who inquired the cause of her melancholy, "is the mother of a fair son, while I am but a barren stock." She did not fail, however, to call dissimulation to her aid, and the next morning, when Melvil received his audience, she appeared gayer and better dressed than usual; and, though she deceived no one but herself, expressed the sincerest affection for the Queen of Scots, and joy at her happy delivery. The innocent cause of this jealousy was baptised at Stirling, 17th December, 1566, by the Bishop of St. Andrews, according to to the rites of the Romish Church. Such of the Scottish nobles as professed the reformed religion absented themselves from the ceremony. His godfathers *Spotswood's History of the Church of Scotland, p. 196. were the King of France and Philibert Duke of Savoy; Elizabeth consented to be his godmother, and by her representative, the Earl of Bedford, sent a present of a golden font, valued at three thousand crowns. After the conclusion of the ceremony, the young prince was publicly proclaimed by the hereditary titles of Prince and Steward of Scotland, Duke of Rothsay, Earl of Carrick, Lord of the Isles, and Baron of Renfrew. According to Sir Theodore Mayerne, who subsequently became the physician of James, the wet nurse of the young prince was a drunkard, and it was owing to her milk becoming thus vitiated, that, though early weaned, he was unable to walk alone before his sixth year.* on her rejecting him, became the victim of despondency, and fell seriously ill. "By my saul," said James, "Mar shanna dee for e'er a lass in the land!" Accordingly he interfered in favour of his early companion, and Lady Mary eventually became his wife, and the mother of his children. Such an impression had Buchanan's discipline produced on the mind of James, that many years afterwards, when King of England, the miseries of his tutelage, and the austerity of his old master, continued vividly to haunt his imagination. He used to say of a certain person about his court, that he trembled at his approach, "he reminded him so of his pedagogue."* And on another occasion, he is described as dreadfully agitated by the appearance of his former corrector in a dream, and as vainly endeavoring to soften the fanciful displeasure which he had incurred. It may be observed, that in his writings, James more than once speaks slightingly, and even acrimoniously, of his old tutor. The birth of an heir to the throne ought not only to have added to Mary's influence at home; but, with proper management, Elizabeth might have been forced to acknowledge her as her successor to the crown of England. Nothing, however, could exceed Mary's egregious imprudence and, shall we add, iniquity, at this period. Within the short space of two years, the greater number The elegant Buchanan was far from satisfied of loose incidents occurred which have thrown with the mere progress which his pupil had made so much of fearful, yet romantic, interest over her in classical and theological learning. At a certain history. The murder of her husband, and her audience, which was given by James to a foreign consequent marriage with Bothwell; the insur- ambassador in his boyhood, it was found necesrection of Lord Hume; her confinement and sary that the conversation should take place in forced abdication at Lochlevin; her romantic Latin. The foreigner happened to be guilty of escape from that fortress; the battle of Langside; several grammatical errors, in every one of which and her flight into England-are all included in James, with equal pedantry and ill-breeding, that period, and closed every hope of her again thought proper to set him right. The ambasenjoying the sovereign dignity. In order, how-sador accidentally meeting Buchanan, after the ever, to weaken her remaining influence still more, and to strengthen the claims of her son, it was decided that the young prince, though only thirteen months old, should be solemnly crowned in her stead. The inauguration of the royal baby was performed at Stirling by the Bishop of Orkney, 29th July, 1567. The coronation sermon was preached by the celebrated John Knox ; and the oaths, that he should maintain the reformed religion, and administer equal justice, were somewhat unscrupulously taken by the Earl of Morton and Lord Home.t Soon after the ceremony, the republican party, whose hopes were naturally elated by the events which were taking place, caused a coin to be struck, on which was inscribed the well-known motto of Trajan: Pro me; si merear, in me." For me; and if I deserve it, against me." James was a pedant even when a boy. His tutor, the famous historian Buchanan, though he communicated to him a portion of his learning, imparted but little of his own elegant taste to his royal pupil. In the treatment of his charge, he appears not only to have been laudably uninfluenced by rank and circumstance, but to have behaved himself towards James as the most rigid disciplinarian. On one occasion the young king was engaged in some boisterous sport, with his playfellow the Master of Erskine, at a time when Buchanan was deeply engaged in his studies. The tutor was annoyed, and declared that he would administer a sound flogging if the interruption continued. James announced stoutly that he should like to see who would bell the cat; at which the tutor started up, threw away his book, and performed the threatened chastisement most effectually. To his playfellow, the young Earl of Mar, James ever continued his regard. The earl afterwards became enamoured of Mary Stuart, daughter of Esme Duke of Lennox, and * Ellis, Orig. Letters, vol. iii. 198, Second Series. audience was at an end, inquired of him how he came to make his illustrious pupil a pedant. "I was happy," said the historian, "to be able to accomplish even that.”‡ CHAPTER II. In his thirteenth year James began to interfere with affairs of state, and met his parliament for the first time. He said a great deal respecting the benefits of peace, and mentioned his anxiety to maintain the interests of the reformed religion, and to remedy publie grievances.§ Probably, young as he was, James had some hand, if not in the composition of, at least in the matters to be discussed in, this juvenile oration. At all events, it is curious to find him commencing his first speech with the subject of peace; a principle and a topic on which he acted and harped to the last. well as to himself, should he hereafter persist in so indolent and injurious a practice.* James's tears at this period seemed to have been easily brought to his assistance. When, in 1582, in his seventeenth year, his person was seized at Ruthven by the rebel lords, his first inpulse was to weep. "No matter for his tears," said the Master of Glamis; "it is better that boys should weep than bearded men."t From a person who felt his own griefs & deeply, we can scarcely expect much sympathy with the sufferings of others. His cold indifference at his mother's death, and his previous lukewarm interposition with Elizabeth in her behalf, can never be sufficiently reprobated. Of an age when the best feelings of our nature are generally warmest in the heart; with a chivalrous nobility urging him to avenge the unparallelled indignity which had been offered both to himself and his country; with the means of obtaining powerful foreign aid both from France and Spain, James, with the exception of some slight blustering, (arising less from any feeling which he entertained for his mother's dreadful situation, than from the apprehension that her death on the scaffold would interfere with his own prospects,) submitted tamely to his own dishonour, and the ignominious execution of his only parent. There can be no question that, as a matter of mere policy, James acted wisely in not breaking with Elizabeth; but who can forgive the man, who, on so sacred a subject, prefers the cold dictates of interest to the common impulse of natural affection? Alas! James had a pension to lose, and a kingdom in prospectu. And how does he act when he finds that his mother's death is fully agreed upon, and that her days are numbered? He sends to the principal divines to desire that they will pray for her in their churches. It is an undoubted fact, that the Master of Gray, James's accredited agent to intercede with Elizabeth for his mother's life, and who, the king must have been well aware, was entirely in the interest of the English queen, if he were not actually in her pay, gave private intimation to the English ministry, that if Mary's execution would not be allowed to prejudice James's expectations to the English throne, "her death would be forgotten."§ The Master of Gray afterwards confessed before the Scottish council, that he had, in fact, advised the Queen of England to take away the life of her rival; recommending, only, that she should be made away with by some underhand means, instead of by a public execution. He acknowledged, also, that he had made use of the significant words, Mortui non mordent. "The dead do not bite." He was sentenced to banishment; a decision much caviled at, at the time, for its extreme leniency.|| He showed his aversion to business at a very early age; so much so, that he was in the habit of signing whatever papers were brought to him, without either reading or making himself acquainted with their contents. To correct this pernicious habit, his tutor Buchanan adopted the following scheme :-one day, when the young king was preparing to set out on a hunting excursion, he placed before him a document containing a formal abdication of his kingdom. It was signed, as usual, without inquiry into its purport. On the return of James in the evening, Buchanan produced the paper, and pointed out its contents. At the sight of what he had done, the king burst into tears. Buchanan comforted him by throwing the document into the fire; at the same time seizing the opportunity of enlarging on the injus- James I. vol. ii. p. 330. tice which he might be guilty of to others, as * Osborne's Advice to his Son. Curiosities of Literature, vol. iii. P. 259. Add. MSS. Brit. Museum. The ruling and obstinate idea which occupied the mind of James, was an apprehension lest the manner of his mother's death should prove a bar to his own succession to the English throne. It was this selfish fear, and not the affront to his feelings or his diadem, which we find the English ministers most anxious to combat. Even previous to the death of the unhappy Mary, the Earl *Peyton's Divine Catastrophe, in Secret Hist. of Spotswood, p. 320. There is also reason to suppose that the King of Denmark, with whose daughter a treaty of marriage had already been set on foot, would, have supplied James with ships.-Sanderson, p. 134, |