xxi
just after the King's eighth birthday, wonders at his skill in translating any chapter of the Bible out of Latin into French, and out of French into English. He also danced for the envoy, and showed himself "sure a prince of great hope, if God send him life." 1 "They gar me speik Latin ar I could speik Scotis," 2 said James, with a touch of the humor and good sense he could display occasionally; but the effect of the drill is shown by the fact that in later life he could speak "Latin and French perfectly and Italian quite well," 3 and knew a great part of the Bible by heart, so that he could refer offhand to chapter and verse.[1]
More exact information regarding the King's studies, evidently at a somewhat later period, may be gained from an undated schedule of his daily tasks, written by the tutor Young and included by Thomas Smith in his notice of Young's life. 5 "After prayers," according to this document, "a period was devoted to Greek, with reading from the New Testament, Isocrates, or Plutarch's Apothegms, and practice in Greek grammar. The rest of the forenoon was given to Livy, Justin, Cicero, or Scottish and other history, and the afternoon to exercises in composition, or, if time permitted, to the study of arithmetic, geography and astronomy, dialectic, or rhetoric." A bill of Gibson, the King's bookbinder, presented before 1580, includes in its list of books a number of school texts evidently worn with use, among them such works as Euclid's Elementa, the Questiones Logica and Questiones Physica of Freigius, Car- danus on the significance of eclipses, Orontius's De Fcetu Humano, Volphius's De Perseverantia, Cassiodorus's Dialec- tica, Beza's De Notis Ecclesia, and Hemmingsen's De Super- stitionibus Magicis. 6 The King's later writings show his
1 Letter to Walsingham, June 30, 1574. Quoted in Tytler's Hist, of Scot., Vol. II, p. 9.
2 Apothegmata Regis, in Young's MSS. Quoted by Warner, p. xiii. 1 Cal. S. P. Venetian, Vol. X, No. 22 (1603).
4
5 Vitae Quorundam Eruditissimorum &illustrium Virorum, London, 1707, p. 6.
Maitland Club Miscellany, Vol. I, p. 17. The payment of the bill is dated October i, 1580.
- ↑ Cal. S. P. Spanish, 1586-1595, p. 250.
