Oh, men of Scotland, though you cannot raise Your long past monarchs from the silent bier; Their deeds are worthy of your highest praise, And simple gratitude demands a tear. Let no base slander on their memory fall, Nor malice of their little faults complain; They were such men as, take them all and all, We ne'er shall look upon their like again! WRITTEN IN 1771. James II. was one of that old race of kings whom the now forgotten bard, above quoted, called upon posterity to remember. At this period of our story he had reached his twenty-first year, but experience had already made him older. The sole blemish to his very handsome countenance was that small red spot which won him the sobriquet of James with the fiery face. He was considerably above the middle height, and was firmly knit in form; his eyebrows were strongly marked, and a dark glossy moustache, curling round his finely cut mouth, mingled with a short peaked beard. His rich brown hair hung, in the profusion of the time, over his ears, in thick masses called "side locks." He was rapid in thought, bold in speech, and prompt in action, fiery and impetuous in temper; resolute and even desperate in avenging a wrong; and of his wild impulsive nature, his most unruly subject, the Earl of Douglas, was, ere long, to have a terrible proof; but yet, like the Moorish knight of Granada, James was said to be, Like steel amid the din of arms, Like wax when with the fair. Some weeks after the outrage which closes the last chapter, on a day when the sun of June, by its golden light and genial heat, was ripening the young corn in many a fertile haugh, and on many a swelling eminence where now the modern city spreads its streets and squares, James was seated in one of the upper chambers of David's Tower, in the Castle of Edinburgh. It was the same in which King David died on the 7th May, eighty years before, and in memory of him there still hung above the fireplace the mail shirt and barrel-shaped helmet which he had worn at the battle of Durham. The vaulted apartment was gloomy, and through the basket-shaped gratings of the windows which faced the east the rays of the summer sun came slanting in, filling one portion with strong light, and leaving the other involved in dusky shadow.