Art. XI. LIST OF WORKS RECENTLY PUBLISHED.

The Title-page, Contents, and Index to Vol. XVII, will be given in the Number for August.

THE

ECLECTIC REVIEW,

FOR AUGUST, 1822.

Art. I. Memoirs of the Court of King James the First. By Lucy Aikin. 2 vols. 8vo. pp. 858. Price 11. 48. London. 1822.

W WORKS of this description, if executed with tolerable ability and fairness, deserve well of the public. Occupying a middle rank between works of dry information and works of amusement, they answer a very useful purpose, in this busy but unlearned age, by making general readers better acquainted with what they ought to be ashamed to be ignorant of-the history of their own country. On this ground, indeed, the Author of Waverley has some claims to the gratitude of his readers; for, although as an expositor of history, he is a most delusive guide, still, we are certainly indebted to him for a personal introduction to some of the most illustrious characters of former days. After reading the Abbot, and Kenilworth, and the Heart of Mid Lothian, we feel that we have not merely read of-we have seen Mary, Queen of Scots, have seen Queen Elizabeth, and Queen Caroline. Were the historical portraits executed with even less fidelity than they are, they would still be valuable as giving an impulse to curiosity respecting the events in which those personages were implicated. In the same manner as the Lady of the Lake sent all our tourists in search of the picturesque amid the scenery of the Trosachs, and Rokeby recalled them to the milder beauties of the Greta, the Tales of my Landlord put its readers upon looking into Scottish history; and the subsequent works of the same inexhaustible pen have tended to create a strong interest in the history of our own country. This interest, the more substantial productions of the memoir-writer are well adapted to gratify. The Memoirs of the Court of Elizabeth form an acceptable supplement to Kenilworth; and the present work will, we doubt not, succeed all the better for the Fortunes of Nigel. VOL. XVIII. N. S.

I

Miss Aikin's object has apparently been, to impart to history the interest, yet not the precise form of biography. In her Memoirs of Queen Elizabeth, she succeeded in doing this. But what power of poet or of novelist could render the real character of James the First, or even his court, interesting? To save him from appearing alternately ridiculous and despicable, is all his biographer can do. His is a reign, indeed, with which it required some courage in a female writer to meddle; and Miss Aikin has evidently felt embarrassed by her task. She hopes that the indulgence which has attended her former labours, will not be found to have deserted her on the present 'occasion, when many circumstances, some of them connected • with the subject of these pages, others of a personal nature, conspire to increase her anxiety and her diffidence.' Yet, the subject has one advantage. The reader brings to the perusal of the history of the reign of James I., fewer prepossessions and less unreasonable expectations. He does not require in the Writer a warmth of imagination which should give to history the colours of poetry, nor does he expect to find in its details the interest of romance. The reign which followed the merry days of good Queen Bess, has never been mistaken for a golden age. It was neither the age of chivalry, nor of gallantry, nor of martial achievements, nor of literary taste. It neither commenced with reformation, nor continued in honour, nor ended with glory. As regards foreign relations, the reign of James is one long disgrace upon our annals. At home, it was the triumph of favouritism, intrigue, ecclesiastical oppression, and profligacy of manners. And yet, this is the reign of which the apologist of the Stuarts says, Could human nature ever reach happiness, the condition of the English gentry under so mild and benign a prince, might merit that appel lation.* Rapin closes his history of this period with an opposite remark, that whatever may be said for and against King James's person, it is certain that England never flourished less than in his reign.' And he gives the following epigram as a proof of the little esteem in which she was held by her neighbours.

Tandis qu' Elizabeth fut roy,
L'Anglois fut d'Espagne l'effroy,
Maintenant, devise et caquette,
Régi par la reine Jaquette.'+*

Hume's Hist. Appendix to the Reign of James I.

+ England, in King Bess's reign,

Once the dread and scourge of Spain,

Has the Don's derision been,

Under Jaqueline her Queen.

The great figure,' remarks Bishop Burnet in his homely language, which the Crown of England had made in Queen Elizabeth's time, who had rendered herself the arbiter of Christendom, and was the wonder of the age, was so much eclipsed, if not quite darkened during this reign, that King James was become the scorn of the age; and while hungry writers flattered him out of measure at home, he was despised by all abroad as a pedant without true judgement, 'courage, or steadiness, subject to his favourites, and delivered up to the counsels or rather the corruption of Spain." James was a striking exception to the general rule, " Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he "will not depart from it." The royal pupil of Buchanan retained nothing of the lessons of his master, but his Latin and his pedantry. The young Presbyterian became the zealous and inexorable prelatist. But the events of his early life sufficiently: explain the change in his sentiments. James was through life the creature of the most debasing of influences, that exercised by a favourite minion; and if the character of a sovereign may be known from that of his favourites, there needs no other proof of the worthlessness of him who could surrender himself to the guidance successively of such miscreants as Arran, Carr, and Villiers. The Duke of Lenox alone, of all his favourites, bore a character respectable in private life; and he was a Papist. The history of James's Scottish reign, is marked by the most deplorable imbecility and misrule. It is clear, that during the whole period, he was acting with profound dissimulation, and looking to the bright reversion of the English monarchy as the event which was to make him his own master. His hypocritical protestation is well known, when, standing up in the General Assembly with his bonnet off and his eyes raised to heaven, he' praised God for being king of such a kirk, the sincerest in the world, adding: As for our neighbouring kirk of England, their 'service is an evil said mass in English; they want nothing of the mass but the liftings.' And yet, in the" Basilicon Doron," he urges upon his son the restoration of the bishops, and their. re-admission into parliament, as the only remedy against that national pest, the Puritans, whom he vituperates as men whom 'no deserts can oblige, neither oaths nor promises bind, breathing nothing but sedition and calumnies, aspiring without measure, railing without reason, and making their own imaginations, without any warrant of the word, the square of their conscience.' At the head of the party thus intempe rately denounced, was Andrew Melville!

"

'It was in vain,' remarks Miss Aikin, that James had declared in his speech to parliament in 1598, that "he minded not to bring in