The steersman and Graeme leaped ashore; the boatmen
remained lying on their oars ready for farther service.
Chapter the Twenty-First.
Could valour aught avail or people's love,
France had not wept Navarre's brave Henry slain;
If wit or beauty could compassion move,
The rose of Scotland had not wept in vain.
_Elegy in a Royal Mausoleum._ LEWIS.
At the gate of the court-yard of Lochleven appeared the stately form
of the Lady Lochleven, a female whose early charms had captivated
James V., by whom she became mother of the celebrated Regent Murray.
As she was of noble birth (being a daughter of the house of Mar) and
of great beauty, her intimacy with James did not prevent her being
afterwards sought in honourable marriage by many gallants of the time,
among whom she had preferred Sir William Douglas of Lochleven. But
well has it been said
----"Our pleasant vices
Are made the whips to scourge us"---
The station which the Lady of Lochleven now held as the wife of a man
of high rank and interest, and the mother of a lawful family, did not
prevent her nourishing a painful sense of degradation, even while she
was proud of the talents, the power, and the station of her son, now
prime ruler of the state, but still a pledge of her illicit
intercourse. "Had James done to her," she said, in her secret heart,
"the justice he owed her, she had seen in her son, as a source of
unmixed delight and of unchastened pride, the lawful monarch of
Scotland, and one of the ablest who ever swayed the sceptre.
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