presented scope for poetic treatment, to render it into verse. This was the office of a ‘King’s Makar’ or Laureate.” There was Warbeck, the pretended Duke of York, plotting in the shadows and wearying the chivalry of James. There was Don Pedro de Ayala, the courtly Spanish Ambassador (who had come on the pretext of offering James a Spanish princess as his Queen, well aware that there was no Spanish princess), and who was writing home to Ferdinand and Isabella enthusiastic descriptions of King James, Scotland, and the Scottish people. “The kingdom is very old, and very noble, and the king possesses great virtues, and no defects worth mentioning.”[10] “An open and magnificent court,” Drummond of Hawthornden acknowledges it; and Dunbar gives a picture of the diversity of men that James IV.’s many interests brought round him:-- Kirkmen, courtmen, and craftsmen fine, Doctors in jure and medicyne: Divinours, rhetours, and philosophours: Astrologists, artists, and oratours: Men of armes and valliant knights: And mony other goodly wights: Musicians, minstrels, and merry singers, Chevalouris, callandaris, and flingars, Cunyeours, carvours, and carpenters, Builders of barks and ballingars, Masouns, lying upon the land, And ship wrights hewing upon the strand, Glasing wrights, goldsmiths, and lapidaris, Printers, paintours, and potingaris. And the King who presided over all this, if but half of De Ayala’s praises be true, was himself as skilled in the arts of peace as of war, spoke eight languages, and said “all his prayers.”[11] Holbein’s miniature is a witness of his personal beauty. All agree that he was a fearless rider, a chivalrous knight, and a brave man. But he was sensitive, subject to sudden fits of depression alternating with his gay humour, and it is told of him that, though he had been but a boy when his father’s estranged nobles had used him as a figure-head for their rebellion, yet he always wore to the day of his death a hidden chain round his body, in constant penance for his father’s death. In his thirtieth year King James married little Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII. of England. The marriage was brought about by the persistence of Henry VII., and was nowise according to the inclinations of the Scottish King, who evaded it for several years after it was first proposed to him. But State reasons prevailed, and at last James gave way. The bridegroom was thirty and the bride was fourteen. But, if James was a tardy wooer, the florid little Tudor had nothing to complain of in the chivalry of the welcome she received from the courteous and sensitive Stuart.