impartiality, notwithstanding that his companion, the little Master of Mar, stood by, on whom vicarious chastisement might have been applied. Lady Mar, rushing to the scene of action at the sound of "the wailing which ensued," took the child from his master's hands and consoled him in her motherly arms, asking Buchanan indignantly how he dared to touch the Lord's anointed. The incident is very natural and amusing in its homely simplicity; the child crying, the lady soothing him, the sardonic old master in his furred nightgown and velvet cap, looking on unmoved, bidding her kiss the place to make it well. The Master of Mar no doubt would cry too for sympathy, and the old gentleman take up his big book and move off to seek a quieter place for study. On another occasion, when the little King tried to get a sparrow from his companion and crushed the bird in the struggle, Buchanan rated him as himself a bird out of a bloody nest. He was an old man and alone in the world, indifferent to future favours from a king whose reign he would probably not live to see, and treating him with impartial justice. There was, however, no indifference to James's education in this austere simplicity: indeed it would seem that Buchanan, like other preceptors of monarchs, had some hope of forming an ideal prince out of the boy. A few years after his appointment to his office, and when James was still too young to profit by it, he began to write his famous treatise, in the form of a dialogue, upon the laws of the kingdom, the duty respectively of kings and subjects. The _De Jure Regni_, published when the King was about twelve, was dedicated to him in a grave and dignified letter in which Buchanan describes his work as an attempt to expound the prerogatives of the Scottish Crown, "in which," he says, "I endeavoured to explain from their very cradle, so to speak, the reciprocal rights and privileges of kings and their subjects." He goes on to say that the book was written in the midst of the public troubles with a view to enlightening the disturbers of the commonwealth as to their duties: but that peace beginning to be established he had sacrificed his argument for the sake of public tranquillity. Now, however, that it may be useful to the development of the King he brings it forth again. The direct address to James is full of that curious self-deception or defective insight which is so common among those who have the training of a pupil of great importance in the world. The boy had grown beyond the age of personal chastisement; he had reached that in which the precocious facility of comprehension, which is so strongly fostered by the circumstances of such a position as his, looks to the dazzled pedagogues and attendants like genius, and there seems no prognostic too happy or too brilliant for the new career in which at last there is about to be fulfilled all that men have dreamed of a king.