Blood need not be shed; life may, nay, will, be extinguished of itself.

For want of trimming it with fresh oil, or screening it from a breath of wind, the quivering light will die in the socket.

To suffer a man to die is not to kill him." "True--I had forgot that policy.

Well, then, suppose my uncle Albany does not continue to live--I think that must be the phrase--who then rules the court of Scotland ?" "Robert the Third, with consent, advice, and authority of the most mighty David, Duke of Rothsay, Lieutenant of the Kingdom, and alter ego; in whose favour, indeed, the good King, wearied with the fatigues and troubles of sovereignty, will, I guess, be well disposed to abdicate.

So long live our brave young monarch, King David the Third! "Ille manu fortis Anglis ludebit in hortis." "And our father and predecessor," said Rothsay, "will he continue to live to pray for us, as our beadsman, by whose favour he holds the privilege of laying his grey hairs in the grave as soon, and no earlier, than the course of nature permits, or must he also encounter some of those negligences in consequence of which men cease to continue to live, and can change the limits of a prison, or of a convent resembling one, for the dark and tranquil cell, where the priests say that the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest ?" "You speak in jest, my lord," replied Ramorny: "to harm the good old King were equally unnatural and impolitic." "Why shrink from that, man, when thy whole scheme," answered the Prince, in stern displeasure, "is one lesson of unnatural guilt, mixed with short sighted ambition?
If the King of Scotland can scarcely make head against his nobles, even now when he can hold up before them an unsullied and honourable banner, who would follow a prince that is blackened with the death of an uncle and the imprisonment of a father?
Why, man, thy policy were enough to revolt a heathen divan, to say nought of the council of a Christian nation.