This strong Scotch strain in the Stuart line of royalty will explain, in a certain degree, how ready so clannish a people as the Scotch were to join insurrection in favor of the exiled Stuarts; a readiness you will surely remember if you have read _Waverley_ and _Redgauntlet_. And in further confirmation of this clannish love, you will recall the ever-renewed and gossipy boastfulness with which the old Scotch gentlewoman, Lady Margaret Bellenden, in _Old Mortality_, tells over and over of the morning when his most gracious majesty Charles II. partook of his _disjune_ at Tillietudlem Castle. But we have nothing to do with so late affairs now, and I have only made this diversion into Scotland to emphasize the facts about the Stuart affiliation to the throne of England, and the reasons for Scotch readiness to fling caps in the air for King Charlie or for the Pretender. _James I._ And now what sort of person was this James Stuart, successor to Elizabeth? He was a man in his thirty-eighth year, who had been a king--or called a king, of Scotland--ever since he was a baby of twelve months old; and in many matters he was a baby still. He loved bawbles as a child loves its rattle; loved bright feathers too--to dress his cap withal; was afraid of a drawn sword and of hobgoblins. He walked, from some constitutional infirmity, with the uncertain step of a child--swaying about in a ram-shackle way--steadying himself with a staff or a hold upon the shoulder of some attendant. He slobbered when he ate, so that his silken doublet--quilted to be proof against daggers--was never of the cleanest. He had a big head and protruding eyes, and would laugh and talk broad Scotch with a blundering and halting tongue, and crack unsavory jokes with his groom or his barber. Yet he had a certain kindness of heart; he hated to see suffering, though he had no objection to suffering he did not see; the sight of blood almost made him faint; his affection for favorites sometimes broke out into love-sick drivel. Withal he had an acute mind; he had written bad poems, before he left Scotland, calling himself modestly a royal apprentice at that craft. He had a certain knack at logical fence and loved to argue a man to death; he had power of invective, as he showed in his _Counterblast to Tobacco_--of which I will give a whiff by and by. He had languages at command, and loved to show it; for he had studied long and hard in his young days, under that first and best of Scotch scholars and pedagogues--George Buchanan. He had, in general, a great respect for sacred things, and for religious observances--which did not prevent him, in his moments of petulant wrath or of wine-y exaltation, from swearing with a noisy vehemence. Lord Herbert of Cherbury--elder brother of the poet Herbert, and English ambassador to France--wittily excused this habit of his sovereign, by saying he was too kind to anathematize men himself, and therefore asked God to do so.