THE citizens of London, towards the close of the sixteenth century, saw a Danish court represented at the Globe theatre, for which some leading traits had been taken from the existing royalty of Denmark. The lesson of drinking deep had been for some years taught at the school of Elsinore; and customs of intemperance, more honoured in the breach than the observance,' had made the heavy-headed revel of the Danes the talk of other nations. The temperate virtues of economy, of delicacy, or self-control, certainly did not reign in the palace where the queen of James the First was born.

Anne was the second daughter of Frederick II., third king of Denmark, in the line which succeeded that of Christiern II., deposed for his extravagant excesses. She was born on the 12th of December 1575. Her grandfather was the greedy Lutheran who absorbed the whole property of the church into his civil list; and who strengthened his crown by uniting to it in perpetuity his father's duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. Her father became wealthier still by the tolls of Elsinore, and by enormous duties on a particular and very popular beer. Her brother, younger than herself by fifteen months, who succeeded to the Danish throne in his eleventh and was crowned in his twentieth year, became James the First's boon companion, and was the king so celebrated in Howell's Letters for having drank thirtyfive toasts at the great banquet at Rhensburgh. He was carried away in his chair at the thirty-sixth, and left the

officers of his court unable to rise from the floor till late next day.

Little is known of the youth of princess Anne but that she was borne about in arms till she was nine years old. Before she was ten there was talk of her marriage at her father's court. A daughter of Denmark, in the preceding century, had been wedded to a Scottish king; and questions of territory, involving the ultimate possession of the Orkney and Shetland Islands, remained unsettled between the two countries. These now induced the proposition of a similar alliance, and the hand of this young princess was offered to the reigning king of Scotland. Four years had to pass, however, before state objections to the marriage were removed; and when it was celebrated by proxy at Cronenburg, on the 20th of August 1589, Anne's father was dead, and the kingdom was governed by a regency in her brother's From Cronenburg, at the close of the ceremony, a fleet of twelve Danish ships set sail for Scotland, to convey the wife to her new home; but adverse winds arose, and after twice making the Scottish coast the Danish admiral was twice driven back to the coast of Norway. It was not thought expedient to hazard a third attempt; and the young queen remained at Upslo till her husband should be made acquainted with this unlooked-for interruption to her voyage. A messenger was sent to James.

name.

He swore at once that witchcraft was at the bottom of it, and he had great faith in his particular power over witches. He had been busy torturing and burning old women for this imaginary crime while Elizabeth of England was murdering his mother; and his experience gave him confidence that he might voyage safely to Upslo himself, and bring his wife safely home. Of any notion that such an enterprise might be prompted by conjugal eagerness he has been careful to disabuse posterity; having drawn up a statement of its secret reasons for the members of his privy council, in which he laboriously clears himself of that imputation. He begins the paper by stating that public and not private considerations had governed him altogether in the matter of his marriage; for as to his 'ain nature,' God be his witness, he

could have abstained langer nor the welfare of his country' could possibly have permitted. As to the journey over sea he was now about to make, he describes it as a determination of his own, not ane of the haill council being present;' and which he had taken thus privately as a contradiction to the common slanders that his chancellor led him daily by the nose, and that he was an irresolute ass who could do nothing of himself. Besides, he characteristically adds, there was really no danger. Set aside the witches, and he was quite safe. The shortness of the way; the surety of the passage, being clean of all sands, foirlands, or sic like dangers; the harbouries in these parts sa suir; and na foreign fleets resorting upon these seas;' are among the amusing assurances he gives his council that he is not going to put himself in jeopardy, for his wife or any other mortal.

In November 1589, at Upslo, James and Anne, he in his twenty-fourth and she in her fifteenth year, for the first time saw each other. He presented himself unannounced, just as he had landed, 'buites and all;' and straightway volunteered a kiss, 'quhilk,' startled not a little at the first sight of her lord,' the queen refusit.' Whatever her dreams may have been, on this wind-swept coast of Norway or by the stormy steep of Elsinore, of the lover she was to meet from over sea, they could hardly have prepared her for the waddling, babbling, blustering, unprincely figure, that thus suddenly proclaimed itself the Scottish king, and tried to fling its arms around her neck in a paroxysm of admiration. The account of James's person which was given a few years later, on authority which has never been disputed, will explain the somewhat natural repulsion awakened by such attempted caresses. The son of an unhappy mother and a miserable marriage, struck even before his birth by the paralysing terror of Rizzio's murder, James was born a coward, and never lived to be able to endure even the sight of a drawn sword. He was of middle stature, and with a tendency to corpulence, which the fashion of his dress very much exaggerated. His clothes were so made as to form a woollen rampart round his person. His breeches were in great plaits and full stuffed, and his doublets quilted for