rated the heroic Stedingers until the year 1834 when, on the sixhundredth anniversary of the battle, a simple iron obelisk, paid for by a few private persons, was unveiled by the then reigning Grand Duke of Oldenburg, so many members of whose family had fallen victims of the Stedinger arms. The inscriptions on the Monument are as follows:

"To the memory of the Stedingers who fell on this battlefield fighting for freedom and faith."

"On the 27th of May, 1234, the brave people succumbed to their mighty foes."

"Bolke von Bardenfleth, Tammo von Huntorp, Detmar tom Dyk fell as leaders with their brethren."

"Consecrated by posterity on the anniversary of the battle

1234."

THE STUARTS-THEIR FAILING AND

THEIR FAILURE.

BY MARY L. HANKIN.

March 4th, 1884.

It is not my intention this evening to attempt to bring before you any fresh facts or incidents in the history of our Stuart kings. These are so well known-the whole subject has been ventilated, and the details of the period in which they lived been treated so very exhaustively by hands so much abler than my own, that it would be wholly impossible for me to do so. All I can aspire to do, will be to place in a strong light certain mental and moral peculiarities which all the best known members of their family appear to have possessed, and which, acting on the emergencies of their times, led, I believe, step by step, to the final catastrophe of their race. We all know, in a general way, that the cause of the inability of the Stuart sovereigns to retain their hold on the loyalty of the English people, was their want of sympathy with the English temper and character.

The Tudors could rule with tyranny and violence, because they understood, and were understood by, their subjects. The Stuarts were hunted, step by step, from prerogative and power, because they could never appreciate the hopes or desires of their people.

So far we tread on very familiar ground, and the whole question of their fall seems to have been easily accounted for, and disposed of over and over again. The expression, "want of

sympathy," however, does not, when we look into it, seem adequately to cover the whole area of the Stuart deficiencies.

It was not that they were knowingly unwilling to conciliate, or even to court the loyalty of their people. They were, as a race, by no means destitute of ability. They were neither particularly vicious or ordinarily cruel. The fatality which haunted each member of the family was not a characteristic, so much as a lack or deficiency.

The Stuarts appear to have been absolutely incapable of seeing any object or situation, save in precisely that position which their wishes or interests required that it should occupy. Within these limits, that is to say, within the narrow focus of their preconceived convictions, they could see keenly and vividly, but in all the range of feeling on the side of, or antagonistic to, their foregone conclusions, they were stone blind, and literally could not see at all.

Perhaps no idiosyncrasy, not coming within the category of moral delinquency, is so absolutely fatal in a ruler as this inability to view any subject save from a purely personal point of view. The Plantagenets and the Tudors, violent and unprincipled as they were, had that robust form of intellect which can take a general view of a subject while holding with pertinacity to its own side.

The Plantagenets, battling inch by inch with their exacting barons, while grasping subsidy and sovereignty, allowed the Parliament to force itself into the pre-eminence which the times required.

The Tudors, firmly conscious that a disjointed age required a strong monarchy, beneath the shelter of which exhausted institutions might be consolidated, with the unconscious intuition of genius, held all parties at bay till a new order of things could rise out of chaos.

But the Stuarts, nurtured in a settled faith in the Divine right of kings, and a belief that a beneficent despotism was the ideal form of government, failed utterly to perceive that liberty,

within just limitations, was the need of the age, and that to which its rulers must satisfy or succumb.

From the day when Robert II., first of the Stuart line, was crowned in Scotland (1370), the misfortunes of their fitful violent race, where stubborn wickedness seemed alternated with illadvised amiability, prepare one for the after failure of their descendants.

From the marriage, 1388, of Marjorie, daughter of the famous Robert Bruce, with Walter, the Steward of Scotland, sprang this most unhappy race. Their son, Robert II., possessed the futile but engaging traits with which we become too familiar in his descendants. John (his son) called himself Robert III., to escape the ominous name of John-unfortunate, it appears, both in England and Scotland-he also was a gentle, incapable person, whose scheme to save his son James from the power of his brother Albany, was to send him to be educated in France. On his way thither he was, as we all know, shipwrecked on the coast of Norfolk, and taken to the English Court, where he was, from motives of policy, detained a prisoner for nineteen years. During thirteen of these, the domineering regent, Albany, wrought his wild will on Scotland. When in 1424, James I. was permitted to return to his own country, he found it in the wildest disorder. Having studied English laws and constitution to good purpose, he tried to force on his barbarous people social and political conditions, which in England had grown up as the natural accompaniments of a higher state of civilization-his vigour, and his relentless determination wrought his doom-he was murdered, 1437, and his son closed a short, and a far less worthy and honourable career in a war with England, which an act of ruthless vengeance on his part had precipitated. James III. struggled through the invariable horrors attending a minority in these stormy days, to display in his own person a compendium of all his family failings, and to die by the hand of an assassin. James IV. romantic and chivalrous as he was, closed his life in an unnecessary struggle with England; and in like manner did James V.-Scott's hero-die broken

hearted for a defeat in a war, to which a wiser man would not have committed himself, or would have lived down.

They were all alike-incapable of seeing beyond the passion of the moment either in folly or in fray. Capable of precipitating a revolution or a rebellion-incapable of organizing or utilising a reformation!

Passing lightly over these early Stuart kings, of whom our records must be somewhat imperfect, we can trace their follies and their failure with more certainty when they begin to act directly on the fortunes of our own country.

We will give, therefore, but brief consideration to Mary Queen of Scots, and pass at once to James VI. of Scotland, and the Ist. of that name in England, and the first also of eminence of our luckless Stuart Sovereigns.

Mary Queen of Scots, in the whole course of her miserable career, could not see ever so dimly the probable relations to, and consequences of, events outside her own over-mastering desires. The fancy of the moment was to her the one real thing existingCrown-popularity-power-life itself, seemed as nought compared with the gratification of an evil inclination or of a feverish spite.

The mantle of her follies descended on her son. James I. pursued a course less dangerous and destructive than that of his mother or his son, only, because he was in many respects more worthless than either. With just sufficient insight into the feelings of those around him to pause ere his own danger became imminent, he had not one glimmer of that proud relentless daring which, in the case of the Queen of Scots and of Charles I. transformed, in the eyes of several generations, a just penalty into a martyrdom. Without tracing the career of James among the factious troubles of his youth and manhood in Scotland, where the difficulties of his position appear to have been overwhelming, it will be fairer to himself to observe his conduct from the day when, accepted as king, with the general consent of a large proportion of the English people, he was escorted by his nobles and gentry in a triumphal procession towards his new capital.