For more than a hundred years it has been the delight of all who care for the poetry of the past, and the story it tells, and tells so pathetically, is now among the “consecrated legends” which every one cherishes. “The best poet among kings, and the best king among poets,” the name of the author of the _Kingis Quair_ heads the list of royal authors. The stanza which he employed, though invented or adopted by Chaucer, takes its title from the King, and “the rime royal” will be in perpetual evidence of his services to poetry, as the University of St. Andrews will be of his services to learning and education. No generation has passed, from Sir Walter Scott to Mrs. Browning, and from Mrs. Browning to Gabriel Rossetti, which has not been lavish of honour and homage to him. But, it seems, we have all been under a delusion. Our simple ancestors believed that James was the author of _Peebles to the Play_ and _Christ’s Kirk on the Green_; but _Peebles to the Play_ and _Christ’s Kirk on the Green_ “are now”--Mr. J. T. T. Brown is speaking--“relegated to the anonymous poetry of the sixteenth century, inexorably deposed by the internal evidence”; and Mr. Brown aspires to send the _Kingis Quair_ the same way. His fell purpose is “to deprive James of his singing garment, and reduce him to the humbler rank of a King of Scots.” There is something almost terrible in the exultation with which Mr. Brown assumes that--the King’s claim to every other poem attributed to him having been completely demolished--it only remains to deprive him of the _Kingis Quair_, to make his poetical bankruptcy complete. And to the demolition of the King’s claim to the “Quair” Mr. Brown ruthlessly proceeds. Now we have no intention of entering into the question of the authenticity of the minor poems to which Mr. Brown refers; but we shall certainly break a lance with this destructive critic in defence of James’s claim to the _Kingis Quair_.