J.  J. Jusserand, Le Roman d’un Roi d’Ecosse And thus for eighteen years the Prince lived a life half-real, half-dream.  The gray days followed each other without change, without adventure.  But the brilliant throng of kings and queens, of knights and ladies, of pilgrims and lovers, and all the make-believe people of storyland stood out all the brighter for the grayness of the background.  And perhaps to the Prince in his quiet tower the storied people were more real than the living, who only now and again came to visit him.  For the storied people were with him always, while the living came and went again and were lost to him in the great world without, of which he knew scarce anything.  But at last across this twilight life, which was more than half a dream, there struck one day a flash of sunshine.  Then to the patient, studious prisoner all was changed.  Life was no longer a twilight dream, but real.  He knew how deep joy might be, how sharp sorrow.  Life was worth living, he learned, freedom worth having, and at length freedom came, and the Prince returned to his country a free King and a happy lover.

How all this happened King James has told us himself in a book called The King’s Quair, which means the King’s little book, which he wrote while he was still a prisoner in England.

King James tells us how one night he could not sleep, try as he might.  He lay tossing and tumbling, “but sleep for craft on earth might I no more.”  So at last, “knowing no better wile,” he took a book hoping “to borrow a sleep” by reading.  But instead of bringing sleep, the book only made him more and more wide awake.  At length he says:—­

    “Mine eyen gan to smart for studying,
    My book I shut, and at my head it laid,
    And down I lay but* any tarrying.”

    Without.

Again he lay thinking and tossing upon his bed until he was weary.

    “Then I listened suddenly,
    And soon I heard the bell to matins ring,
    And up I rose, no longer would I lie. 
    But now, how trow ye? such a fantasy
    Fell me to mind, that aye methought the bell
    Said to me, ‘Tell on man what thee befell.’

    Thought I tho’ to myself, ’What may this be? 
    This is mine own imagining,
    It is no life* that speaketh unto me;
    It is a bell, or that impression
    Of my thought causeth this illusion,
    That maketh me think so nicely in this wise’;
    And so befell as I shall you devise.”

    Living person.

Prince James says he had already wasted much ink and paper on writing, yet at the bidding of the bell he decided to write some new thing.  So up he rose,

    “And forth-with-all my pen in hand I took,
    And made a + and thus began my book.”

Prince James then tells of his past life, of how, when he was a lad, his father sent him across the sea in a ship, and of how he was taken prisoner and found himself in “Straight ward and strong prison” “without comfort in sorrow.”  And there full often he bemoaned his fate, asking what crime was his that he should be shut up within four walls when other men were free.