th his fellow-men, and obliges him to depend on his own native powers for distin. It is curious, too, to get at the history of a monarchs heart, and to ?nd the simple affes of human nature throbbing uhe ermine. But James had learnt to be a poet before he was a king; he was schooled in adversity, and reared in the pany of his own thoughts.
Monarchs have seldom time to parley with their hearts or to meditate their minds into poetry; and had James been brought up amidst the adulation and gayety of a court, we should never, in all probability, have had such a poem as the Quair.
* Quair, an old term for book.
I have been particularly ied by those parts of the poem which breathe his immediate thoughts ing his situation, or which are ected with the apartment iower. They have thus a personal and local charm, and are given with such circumstantial truth as to make the reader present with the captive in his prison and the panion of his meditations.
Such is the at which he gives of his weariness of spirit, and of the i which ?rst suggested the idea of writing the poem. It was the still mid-watch of a clear moonlight night; the stars, he says, were twinkling as ?re in the high vault of heaven, and "thia rinsing her golden locks in Aquarius." He lay in bed wakeful aless, and took a book to beguile the tedious hours. The book he chose was Boetius solations of Philosophy, a work popular among the writers of that day, and which had been translated by his great prototype, Chaucer. From the high eulogium in which he indulges, it is evident this was one of his favorite volumes while in prison; and i is an admirable text-book for meditation under adversity. It is the legacy of a noble and enduring spirit, puri?ed by sorrow and suffering, bequeathing to its successors in calamity the maxims of sweet morality, and the trains of eloquent but simple reasoning, by which it was eo bear up against the various ills of life. It is a talisman, which the unfortunate may treasure up in his bosom, or, like the good King James, lay upon his nightly pillow.
After closing the volume he turns its tents over in his mind, and gradually falls into a ?t of musing on the ?ess of fortuhe vicissitudes of his own life, and the evils that had overtaken him even in his tender youth. Suddenly he hears the bell ringing to matins, but its sound, chiming in with his melancholy fancies, seems to him like a voice exh him to write his story. In the spirit of poetic errantry he determio ply with this intimatioherefore takes pen in hand, makes with it a sign of the cross to implore a beion, and sallies forth into the fairy-land of poetry. There is somethiremely fanciful in all this, and it is iing as furnishing a striking aiful instance of the simple manner in which whole trains of poetical thought are sometimes awakened and literary enterprises suggested to the mind.
In the course of his poem, he more than once bewails the peculiar hardness of his fate, thus doomed to lonely and inactive life, and shut up from the freedom and pleasure of the world in which the mea animal indulges uraihere is a sweetness, however, in his very plaints; they are the lamentations of an amiable and social spirit at being dehe indulgence of its kind and generous propensities; there is nothing in them harsh nor exaggerated; they ?ow with a natural and toug pathos, and are perhaps rendered more toug by their simple brevity.
They trast ?nely with those elaborate and iter