bassies, to the Emperor and to the king of Spain. He returned from Spain in March 1617, and, after embroiling himself with his wife's family and challenging her brother, quitted England again in a few months for Italy, leaving his affairs in great disorder, openly professing himself a catholic, and disregarding an order of council for his return. After his departure, his lady and her mother accounted for this abrupt and suspicious desertion of his country and connexions, by accusing him of having made an attempt to poison them, in consequence of their detecting him in an intrigue with the countess of Exeter, the youthful spouse of his infirm and aged grandfather. No sooner did this tale of family scandal come to the ears of the king, than he summoned the three ladies privately to his presence; when lady Lake and lady Roos produced to him a written confession, signed by the countess, in which she acknowledged her guilt in joining in an attempt to poison them, and implored their forgiveness. The countess, on the other hand, denied the genuineness of this paper and affirmed her innocence; and she had the good fortune to gain over the monarch to her side. It is said, that on pretence of a hunting party he visited the chamber in lord Exeter's house at Wimbledon, in which the confession of the countess was stated to have been signed; and convinced himself that a servant who was produced as having been a witness to the transaction, could not have stood concealed behind the hangings, as she pretended; and, if she could, would have been at too great a di stance stance to overhear what passed. Armed with this discovery, and with some testimonials from lord Roos, James determined to support the countess in proceeding against lady Lake and her daughter for defamation; and sending for sir Thomas, he earnestly advised him to forbear embarking himself in this quarrel, of which he had determined to make a star-chamber matter. Lake thanked the king, but nobly said, that he could not cease to be a husband and a father; and he persisted in putting his name in a cross bill with those of his wife and daughter. The hearing of the cause took up five days; and the judges appear to have held the matter extremely dubious, till the king, who had hitherto preserved a mysterious silence, announced his important discoveries on the scene of action. After this, the decision could not be doubtful; sir Thomas Lake and his lady were fined 10,000l. to the king himself, who concurred in the decree, and 5,000l. to the countess; lady Roos, in consideration of some confession made by her in the midst of the trial, was pardoned; but sir Thomas, in addition to his penalty, lost all his places of honor and profit, and was never reinstated in the favor of the royal judge whose will and pleasure he had dared on this occasion to resist. The king characteristically ended by comparing their crimes" to the first plot of the first sin in paradise, the lady to the serpent, her daughter to Eve, and sir Thomas to poor Adam, whose love to his wife, the old sin of our father, had beguiled hima.” Saunderson's Reign of James I., pp. 447-449. From From the whole account of this affair it appears, that, even supposing the imputed guilt of lady Lake and her daughter to be incontestable, the innocence of sir Thomas Lake was equally so; but the vanity of James was interested in supporting the credit of his own discovery, and to this sentiment he sacrificed without scruple a faithful and unoffending servant. Immediately after these star-chamber matters, the great schoolmaster" of the land proceeded to edify not his own subjects alone, but the whole of lettered Europe, by the publication of a complete collection of his prose works, both in the original and in a Latin translation. Versions of several of his majesty's pieces had been previously made by different hands, especially one of the "Apology for the oath of allegiance," by sir Henry Wotton, and it is probable that these were employed on this occasion; but the version was completed and the work edited by James Montague, brother to the lord-treasurer, bishop of Winchester and dean of the chapel-royal; one of the greatest favorites and flatterers of king James among an order peculiarly devoted to his pleasure and observant of his foibles. The bishop's preface, designed to prove that it is by no means derogatory to the dignity of a monarch to be a writer of books, is an admirable specimen of the pedantic and laborious trifling which was the fashion of the age and the delight of the sovereign. The prelate is not ashamed to set at the head of his catalogue of royal authors the deity himself, as the dictator dictator of the Mosaic tables; and to assign the second place to the Messiah, on account of the sentence which he is related to have written in the dust; he then runs through a long list of celebrated monarchs, from the earliest records down to queen Elizabeth, some of whom are enumerated because they were, and others because they were not, writers of books. It is almost superfluous to mention, that the whole is crowned with a magnificent and solemn eulogium of the writings of king James, to which astonishing effects are ascribed in the conversion of papists, and literary immortality is confidently promised. This publication is in one volume folio; it contains, besides the king's tractates on various subjects, most of which have been already referred to, five of his speeches;-two in parliament, two at Whitehall, and one in the star-chamber. The work is dedicated by the editor to Charles prince of Wales. The religious dissentions in the United Provinces between the Arminians and Gomarists, otherwise called remonstrants and counter-remonstrants, had been dexterously improved by prince Maurice to the establishment of his own ascendency; and as the means of obtaining further advantages over his political antagonist Barnevelt, he had listened to the representations of the Gomarist divines, whose party he favored, on the expediency of calling a synod in which the errors of Arminius might undergo a final condemnation. On this occasion, he paid his friend the the king of Great Britain the welcome compliment of requesting that he would delegate to this assembly some able divines who should represent the churches of England and Scotland; similar invitations were also extended to the protestants of Germany and the reformed of Switzerland and of France, which were willingly accepted by all, though the subsequent interference of Louis XIII. prevented any subjects of his from fulfilling their engagement. Thus summoned and thus constituted, this celebrated protestant synod was opened at the city of Dordrecht, or Dort, in November 1618, the British deputies taking place next to those of the United Provinces. The choice of these deputies was a matter of considerable delicacy, and had doubtless cost their sovereign much anxious deliberation. Carefully educated in the presbyterian church of Scotland, James had received as his original system of faith the doctrine of Calvin in all its rigor; and a genuine horror of the Arminian theory on the subjects of grace and election, had been doubtless the principal if not sole motive of his furious declarations in the matter of Vorstius. But several considerations of great moment to him as a monarch and a politician, had since intervened to moderate his polemical zeal. The system of Arminius, which the king was pledged to reprobate in Holland, had in England already become that of many of the most able champions of the prelatical or high-church party, with which he had contracted so close and affectionate an alliance: on the |