James the Just

“ Princes little know how ill-chosen attendants speak of them, almost within ear-shot. A king who suffers the licentious in his ante-chamber, may be certain that their libertine tongues will make free with himself.
"How long Overbury stays!" said another; "if Rochester does not mind, he will supplant him in James's favour."
"He does not seem particularly high in Carr's favour just now," rejoined Graham; "for he has been hunting him all the morning, and the noble lord favourite has avoided him vigorously and successfully." ”

“ Now this was precisely what Colonel Parsons and his wife could never acknowledge; for them one view was certainly right, and the other as certainly wrong. There was no middle way. To doubt what they believed could only be ascribed to arrant folly or to wickedness. Sometimes James was thrown into a blind rage by the complacency with which from the depths of his nescience his father dogmatised. No man could have been more unassuming than he, and yet on just the points which were most uncertain his attitude was almost inconceivably arrogant. ”

“ It figured for him, clearly, as a final idea, a conception of the last vividness. He might have been signifying by it the sharp corners and hard edges, all the stony pointedness, the grand right geometry of his spreading Palladian church. Just so, he was insensible to no feature of the felicity of a contact that, beguilingly, almost confoundingly, was a contact but with practically yielding lines and curved surfaces. “You’re round, my boy,” he had said—“you’re ALL, you’re variously and inexhaustibly round, when you might, by all the chances, have been abominably square. ”

“ James sent to Vienna and Madrid piteous letters, in which he recounted his misfortunes, and implored the assistance of his brother kings, his brothers also in the faith, against the unnatural children and the rebellious subjects who had driven him into exile. But there was little difficulty in framing a plausible answer both to the reproaches of Lewis and to the supplications of James. Leopold and Charles declared that they had not, even for purposes of just selfdefence, leagued themselves with heretics, till their enemy had, for purposes of unjust aggression, leagued himself with Mahometans. ”

“ Then, their backs turned, he would drop down on it, the bench of desolation—which was what he, and he only, made it by sad adoption; where, for that matter, moreover, once he had settled at his end, it was marked that nobody else ever came to sit. He saw people, along the Marina, take this liberty with other resting presences; but his own struck them perhaps in general as either of too grim or just of too dingy a vicinage. He might have affected the fellow-lounger as a man evil, unsociable, possibly engaged in working out the idea of a crime ”

“ Do you get a handsome percentage and are you to make a good thing of it?”
The young man coloured under this stinging pleasantry—whether from a good conscience affronted or from a bad one made worse; but he otherwise showed a bold front, only bending his eyes a moment on his watch. “As he’s to come to you himself—and I don’t know why the mischief he doesn’t come!—he will answer you that graceful question.”
“Will he answer it,” Lord Theign asked, “with the veracity that the suggestion you’ve just made on his behalf represents him as so beautifully adhering to?” ”

“ 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. ”

“ I think it will be Jim who'll do it."
She wondered. "Get hold of him?"
"No; just the other thing. Counteract Sarah's spell." And he showed now—our friend—how far he had worked it out. "Jim's intensely cynical."
"Oh dear Jim!" Mme. de Vionnet vaguely smiled.
"Yes, literally, dear Jim! He's awful. What he wants,—heaven forgive him—is to help us."
"You mean"—she was eager—"help me?"
"Well, Chad and me in the first place. But he throws you in too, though without, as yet, seeing you much. Only, so far as he does see you—if you don't mind—he sees you as very advanced." ”

“ He's thirty at the most. He can't possibly be more. And there he is: as fine, as swaddled, as royal a mummy, to the eye, as one would wish to see. Don't pretend! But it's all right." I laughed as I took myself up. "I must talk to Lady John."
I did talk to her, but I must come to it. What is most to the point just here is an observation or two that, in the smoking-room, before going to bed, I exchanged with Ford Obert. ”

“ Then he talked spontaneously, humorously, and often extravagantly, just as he will appear to have written to his correspondents. Sometimes he was vehement, but never ponderous; and he never made anyone, no matter how humble, feel that he was trying to "impress." Men and women of all sorts felt at ease with him, and anybody who, in Touchstone's phrase, [19] had any philosophy in him, was soon expounding his private hopes, faiths, and skepticisms to James with gusto. He was, distinctly, not a man who required a submissive audience to put him in the vein. ”

“ Well, he seemed to have it all. “Everything. I can live with you—just this way.” To illustrate which he dropped into the other chair by her fire; where, leaning back, he gazed at the flame. “I can’t give you up. It’s very curious. It has come over me as it did over you when you renounced Bognor. That’s it—I know it at last, and I see one can like it. I’m ‘high.’ You needn’t deny it. That’s my taste. I’m old.” And in spite of the considerable glow there of her little household altar he said it without the scowl.
THE BENCH OF DESOLATION ”

“ He had picked up his hat, which he had brought in, and stood twirling it in a way that gave me, even as I was just nearly reaching port, a perverse horror of what I was doing. To do it in any way was an act of violence, for what did it consist of but the obtrusion of the idea of grossness and guilt on a small helpless creature who had been for me a revelation of the possibilities of beautiful intercourse? Wasn’t it base to create for a being so exquisite a mere alien awkwardness? ”

“ The weather for a month has been perfect, the sky an extravagance of blue, the air lively enough, the nights cool, nippingly cool, and the whole ancient greyness lighted with an irresistible smile. Rome, which in some moods, especially to new-comers, seems a place of almost sinister gloom, has an occasional art, as one knows her better, of brushing away care by the grand gesture with which some splendid impatient mourning matron—just the Niobe of Nations, surviving, emerging and looking about her again—might pull off and cast aside an oppression of muffling crape. ”

“ Bread very confidently; "she has always been afraid, or at least for a long time. Her fear was there—it was always like a pit that yawned for her. That was the real trouble, sir. She was just a fair peach, I may say, with but one little speck. She had one little sad spot. You pushed her into the sunshine, sir, and it almost disappeared. Then they pulled her back into the shade, and in a moment it began to spread. Before we knew it she was gone. She was a delicate creature." ”

“ Just as the vibration of this last stroke was dying on the air the door of communication with Searle’s room was flung open and my companion stood on the threshold, pale as a corpse, in his nightshirt, shining like a phantom against the darkness behind him. “Look well at me!” he intensely gasped; “touch me, embrace me, revere me! You see a man who has seen a ghost!” ”

“ James justly regarded these renegades as the most serviceable tools that he could employ. It was not from the stouthearted Cavaliers, who had been true to him in his adversity, that he could expect abject and unscrupulous obedience in his prosperity. The men who, impelled, not by zeal for liberty or for religion, but merely by selfish cupidity and selfish fear, had assisted to oppress him when he was weak, were the very men who, impelled by the same cupidity and the same fear, would assist him to oppress his people now that he was strong. ”

“ Yet it was a pretension that Lord Theign sustained—as to show himself far from all bourgeois narrowness. “She has her friends by the score—at this time of day.” There was clearly a claim here also—to know the time of day. “But in the matter of friends where, by the way, is your own—of whom I’ve but just heard?”
“Oh, off there among the pictures too; so they’ll have met and taken care of each other.” Accounting for this inquirer would be clearly the least of Lord John’s difficulties. “I mustn’t appear to Bender to have failed him ”

“ As he passed along, all ranks of men flocked about him from every quarter, allured by interest or curiosity. Great were the rejoicings, and loud and hearty the acclamations, which resounded from all sides; and every one could remember how the affability and popular manners of their queen displayed themselves amidst such concourse and exultation of her subjects. But James, though sociable and familiar with his friends and courtiers, hated the bustle of a mixed multitude; and though far from disliking flattery, yet was he still fonder of tranquillity and ease. ”

“ I used to want a great many things before and to be angry I didn’t have them. Theoretically I was satisfied, as I once told you. I flattered myself I had limited my wants. But I was subject to irritation; I used to have morbid, sterile, hateful fits of hunger, of desire. Now I’m really satisfied, because I can’t think of anything better. It’s just as when one has been trying to spell out a book in the twilight and suddenly the lamp comes in. I had been putting out my eyes over the book of life and finding nothing to reward me for my pains; ”

“ See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular cases, and generalizes. Truth, for him, becomes a class-name for all sorts of definite working-values in experience. For the rationalist it remains a pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer. When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just WHY we must defer, the rationalist is unable to recognize the concretes from which his own abstraction is taken. He accuses us of DENYING truth; ”

“ James, unable to resist so strong a combination as that of his people, his parliament, his son, and his favorite, had been compelled to embrace measures for which, from temper as well as judgment, he had ever entertained a most settled aversion. Though he dissembled his resentment, he began to estrange himself from Buckingham, to whom he ascribed all those violent counsels, and whom he considered as the author, both of the prince’s journey to Spain, and of the breach of the marriage treaty. ”

“ With reference to the case James has been upon: Do you plead for your respect to the rich, because you are to love your neighbour as yourselves? Why then show also an equitable and due regard to the poor, because you are to love your neighbour as yourself: or else your offending in one point will spoil your pretence of observing that law at all. Whosoever shall keep the whole law, if he offend in one point, wilfully, avowedly, and with continuance, and so as to think he shall be excused in some matters because of his obedience in others, he is guilty of all ”

“ There be birds in the air to carry such words whither ye would not. If God has thought good to take one monarch to Himself, He has given us another of the same name and race to set upon the throne. Let us thank Him from our hearts for this great goodness, and cry aloud in joy and gratitude, 'Long live King James!'"
As he spoke he lifted his hat and waved it above his head, and all who wore theirs instinctively uncovered, and many amongst us, led by the hearty voice of my uncle, strove to raise the shout, "Long live King James the Second!" ”

“ The eyes of the English nation had long been fixed upon him as their deliverer from the tyranny of James. He was a sincere Protestant, a bold and enterprising genius, and a consummate statesman. But he delayed taking any (p. 229) decisive measures until affairs were ripe for his projects—until the misgovernment and encroachments of James drove the nation to the borders of frenzy. He then obtained the consent of the States General for the meditated invasion of England, and made immense preparations, which, however, were carefully concealed from the spies and agents of James. ”

“ James's court was as great in inconsistency as himself. His father's grossness, his mother's refinement, and the faults common to both, were equally to be seen in it—drunkenness and poetry, dirt and splendour, impiety with claims to religion, favouritism without principle, the coarsest and most childish buffoonery, and the exquisite fancies of the masque. ”

“ Nothing, perhaps, shows one side of the character of James—his decision, daring, and resolute energy—better than the transaction of the night in May, 1528, when, slipping the Douglas leash at Falkland, he galloped through the defiles of the Ochils with Jockie Hart, and appeared at once as unquestioned king among his nobles at Stirling. As energetic, however, and almost as dramatic were the young monarch’s measures for restoring order in his disordered realm. ”