HENRY Prince of Wales, eldest son of King James VI. of Scotland, by Anne, sister of the king of Denmark, and one of the most accomplished princes of the age in which he lived, was born on the 19th of February 1594. Besides his knowledge of the learned languages, he spoke the French and Italian; and he had made a considerable progress in philosophy, history, fortification, mathematics, and cosmography, in which last branches he was instructed by that excellent mathematician Mr Edward Wright. He aspired to know something of every thing, and to excel in what was most excellent. He had a just opinion of the great abilities of Sir Walter Raleigh; and is reported to have said, in allusion to the long imprisonment of Raleigh, that no king but his father would keep such a bird in a cage. That eminent writer, soldier, and statesman, had a reciprocal regard for the prince, to whom he had designed to address a discourse on the Art of War by Sea, which his highness's death discouraged the author from finishing. He had also intended, and, as he expresses it, hewn out a second and third volume of his History of the World, which were to have been dedicated to his highness; "but it has pleased God," says he, "to take that glorious prince out of this world," a prince, "whose unspeakable and never-enough-lamented loss hath taught me to say with Job, Versu est in luctum cithara mea, et organum meum in vocem flentium." The prince died in November 1612. Dr Welwood, in his Notes on Wilson's Life of King James I. informs us, though without giving any authority, that when the prince fell sick, the queen sent to Sir Walter Raleigh for some of his celebrated cordial, which she herself had taken some time before in a fever with remarkable success. Raleigh sent it, together with a letter to the queen, in which he expressed a tender concern for the prince; and, boasting of his medicine, said, "that it would certainly cure him or any other of a fever, except in case of poison." Sir Anthony Weldon suggests that the prince was poisoned; and the same notion is countenanced by Wilson and by Dr Welwood. Bishop Burnet likewise informs us, that Colonel Titus had heard King Charles I. declare, that the prince his brother was poisoned by means of Viscount Rochester, afterwards Earl of Somerset. But it will perhaps be sufficient to oppose to all such suggestions the unanimous opinion of the physicians who attended the prince during his sickness, and opened his body after his death; from which, as Dr Welwood himself observes, there can be no inference drawn that he was poisoned. To this may be added the authority of Sir Charles Cornwallis, who was well informed and above all suspicion in this point, and who pronounces the rumours spread of his highness having been poisoned as groundless; affirming that his death was natural, and occasioned by a violent fever.