Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 154.djvu/795

in his youth, Shakespeare had dedicated his "Venus and Adonis" and his "Lucrece"; and the other was William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, whom some take to have been the "Mr W. H." of Shakespeare's Sonnets, and who is known independently, by the subsequent dedication to him and his brother of the first folio edition of Shakespeare's works, to have been a special admirer of Shakespeare, and on terms of intimacy with him while he lived. Besides these four great English earls, there were with the king a number of English barons and knights, one of the barons a certain then well-known Lord Zouche of Haryngworth, and one of the knights a Sir Thomas Lake, then English Secretary of State. Moreover, the king had taken three English bishops with him—one of them Bishop Lancelot Andrewes—and not a few minor English ecclesiastics, among whom was Dr William Laud, not yet a bishop, but a busy man already in the English Church as a propagandist of those peculiar ecclesiastical views of which, when he did become bishop and archbishop, both England and Scotland were to have ample experience. Nor do we exhaust the matter when we simply imagine these eminent Englishmen as coming into Scotland with the king in May 1617 and going back with him into England in the following August with reports of what they had seen and done in the north. Six of them returned mere Englishmen no longer, but converted into what may be called honorary Scots. The Earls of Buckingham, Arundel, and Pembroke, with Lord Zouche, Sir Thomas Lake, and Bishop Andrewes, were by his Majesty's orders made members of his Scottish Privy Council, and, appearing personally in the chamber in the High Street of Edinburgh where the Council held its meetings, were sworn into the office with all the accustomed forms. It was an honour not likely to be forgotten by themselves, or to be omitted by the English heralds thenceforth in the enumeration of their titles.

From this sketch it will have been seen that one effect of King James's visit to Scotland in 1617 must have been a sudden increase of interest among the English in Scotland and her concerns. There had always, of course, been a good deal of intercourse between the two countries; and since the accession of James to the English throne the amount of coming and going between them had corresponded to the new intimacy of their mutual relations. But the movement hitherto had been far more of Scots into England than of Englishmen into Scotland. Since James had become King of England, the shoaling of lean and hungry Scots southwards after him, in quest of richer pastures and better incomes, had been proverbial with the English, a subject of incessant satire with them, and indeed a sore social grievance,—the grievance all the greater because the ascertained counter-attractions of Scotland had not as yet been sufficient to establish a return current of English pilgrims north-wards. Nowadays the counter-attractions have been amply ascertained; and every autumn hundreds of titled or wealthy Englishmen come into Scotland for the pleasures of grouse-shooting, salmon-fishing, and deer-stalking, and thousands of less privileged English tourists come also for the more modest pleasures of admiring romantic scenery, climbing Scottish mountains, and wearing kilts. At the time with which we are dealing, all this was in the far future; and English adventurers