Could he have foreseen the history of the next three generations—the execution of his son, Charles the First; the debauched reign of his grandson, Charles the Third, after his return from exile; and the banishment of James the Second, he would have found the outlook even more sad than the retrospect. The lines of the Stuart family did not fall in pleasant places. Some writer has observed that they suffered for the crimes of the Tudors. It may be that England had piled up a century of wrong which demanded atonement, but, without prejudice, the proverb was emphatically true, “Sufficient unto each reign was the evil thereof.” It must also be remembered that all Europe was in a ferment. The celebrated Thirty Years’ War was raging in Germany. Religious enthusiasm was asserting its power in Britain. The English and Scotch people were jealous of their political rights. The reign of a Scottish-born king, after so many centuries of bitter hate, could not be entirely acceptable to the English race. Both sides accused the king of partiality. Needy lords and nobles poured down from the north, and London resembled our own National Capital at the inauguration of a new president. The king was supplicated in Court, in the street, on horseback, at every doorway; ay, the very plate that contained his food was adorned with urgent request from some impatient relative of fifteenth or twentieth cousinship. As the Court had removed from Edinburgh and Scotland it seemed that Edinburgh and Scotland had removed to the Court. The ancient prejudice between Scot and English broke out in street, palace and inn. These are the historic events which preface the “Fortunes of Nigel,” and the fray between the Scottish servant and the ’prentice boys of London, at the opening of the volume, strikes the keynote of universal discord. It was a constitutional defect of James the First to be without money. As Nigel, the Scottish lord, happened to need the loan which his father had made to the king, he presented himself with the old fashioned assurance of a man justly demanding his rights, although at the hands of a monarch. The king was incensed, but the young lord fortunately falls in with George Heriot, the wealthy Scotch jeweler “to His Majesty,” whose princely bequests still adorn the city of Edinburgh; but, unmindful of good counsel, he gradually lapses from duty, becomes a murderer in what he considers a matter of honor, is compelled to find refuge in Alsatia or Whitefriars, a sort of privileged den of iniquity. The portrayal of his experience in this nest of outlaws is true to the London of 1620.