Page:New Poems by James I.djvu/31

 and Du Bartas; in Italian, Dante and Petrarch; and the classics in abundance both in the original and in translation.

One of the most interesting portions of Young's MS. is a list, later than the rest, of forty-six books taken from Stirling to Holyrood House, November n, 1583, presumably chosen by the King himself, who was then in his eighteenth year, and at a time coincident with his first essays in verse under Montgomerie. Aside from a dozen or more volumes of the classics, and political treatises such as Cheke's Hurt of Sedition, The True Religion and Popery, and Buchanan's De Jure Regni, the list includes Daneau's Geographica Poetica, Ronsard's La Françiade and two volumes of his Poémes, and Du Bellay's Musagnaemachie and L'Olive augmentee. The latter items may indicate the King's preparatory reading for the sonnets and the treatise on the art of poesy in The Essayes of a Prentise. Aside from the influence of older native poetry, the poetic theory and practice of both James and Montgomerie were based chiefly on French models.

Nothing very serious, one might think, could be wrong with a young gentleman who would undertake so profitable a course of reading as the one just outlined. James, indeed, emerged or escaped from the hands of his guardians a mixture of curious and not wholly unlikable qualities. Whatever he was willing to pretend or call himself for political purposes, it must be admitted that his religious convictions were reasonably founded and sincere. From the worst vices of his family and nation he was free; he did not drink to excess, and he was so continent that he excited the anxiety of the court; and he was reasonably observant of the rest of the commandments, if one excepts the third, fourth,