under the replaced boards, cowers the King, while the Queen and her women seek to barricade the door. One brave young lady, Catherine Douglas, thrusts her beautiful arm into the staple from which the bolt had been removed. It is broken in a moment, and she sinks back, to bear, with her descendants--a family well known in Scotland--the name of _Barlass_ ever since. The murderers, who had previously killed in the passage one Walter Straiton, a page, rush in, with naked swords, wounding the ladies, striking, and well-nigh killing the Queen, and crying, with frantic imprecations, 'This is but a woman! Where is James?' Finding him not in the chamber, they leave it, and disperse through the neighbouring apartments in search. James, who had become wearied of his immurement, and thought the assassins were gone, calls now on one of the ladies to aid him in coming out of his place of concealment. But while this is being effected, one of the murderers returns. The cry, 'Found, found,' rings through the halls; and after a violent but unarmed resistance, the King is, with circumstances of horrible barbarity, first mangled, then run through the body, and then despatched with daggers. In vain he offers half his kingdom for his life; and when he seeks a confessor from Grahame, the ruffian replies, 'Thou shalt have no confessor but this sword.' It is satisfactory to know that the Queen made her escape, and that the criminals were punished, although the tortures they endured are such as human nature shrinks from conceiving, and history with a shudder records. * * * * * We turn with pleasure from King James's life and death to his poetry, although there is so little of it that a sentence or two will suffice. 'The King's Quhair' is a poem conceived very much in the spirit, and written in the style of Chaucer, whose works were favourites with James. There is the same sympathy with nature, and the same perception of _its_ relation to and unconscious sympathy with human feelings, and the same luscious richness in the description, alike of the early beauties of spring and of youthful feminine loveliness, although this seems more natural in the young poet James than in the sexagenarian author of 'The Canterbury Tales.' There is nothing even in Chaucer we think finer than the picture of Lady Jane Beaufort in the garden, particularly in the lines-- 'Or are ye god Cupidis own princess, And comen are ye to loose me out of band? Or are ye very Nature the goddess, That have depainted with your heavenly hand This garden full of flowers as they stand?' Or where, picturing his mistress, he cries-- 'And above all this there was, well I wot, Beauty enough to make a world to dote.' Or where, describing a ruby on her bosom, he says-- 'That as a spark of low[1] so wantonly Seemed burning upon her white throat.' [1] 'Low:' fire.