At the imperial command the convent choir had been reinforced by some sixteen picked melodious friars; Charles himself, ever fond of music and a singer of anthems, now performed pro virili as their precentor. His nice ear and musical memory detected alike a borrowed motet in the maestro de capilla, as a false note in a singer, whom he rated by name with some gracious addition of Hideputa bermejo-"a red-headed son of -:" an expression derogatory to the mother of any vocalist, let alone a church quirister, and, as Mr. Stirling says, "certainly savoring more of the camp than the cloister."

On the whole his regular habits accorded well with monastic life, in which one day is like another, and all creep in their petty pace to dusty death. The order of the course was this at waking his confessor assisted at his private devotions, then his valets at his toilette; after mass he sat down to mess, dalla massa alla mensa; his dinner was long, for his appetite was prodigious, and the mastication of his toothless gums, and the carving with his gout-crippled fingers, tedious: meantime his physician stood at one side waging fruitless war to the knife and fork too, and his man of letters stood on the other to discourse pleasantly, and then read him to the subsequent siesta from a good book. Such sleep as a patristic folio could induce, mass again, a sermon, and an anthem filled up the afternoon. Evening brought the sauntering in the sun amid his flower-beds, or persecuting wood-pigeons with his gun: while, if detained in doors by rain or rheumatism, there were the pet parrot, the tame cats, the mechanical workshop, talk with some visitor, and last, not least, state business with his secretary; after vespers came supper, a meal much like the dinner," which made his chamberlain's loyal heart quake.

This high officer, the chief among the fifteen confidential persons who formed his "chamber," has already been introduced by our author. Don Luis Quixada, the type of a good old Castilian soldier and hidalgo, was spare and sinewy in frame, formal in manners and cut of his beard, full of strong sense and prejudices, proud and punctilious, but true as steel to his faith and king, and an excellent hater of all Jews, heretics, and friars. Good Quixada may possibly have been in the mind's eye of Cervantes when he drew his immortal Quixote. To this tried follower Charles had confided the care of his illegitimate son, the subsequently celebrated Don Juan of Austria: the secret was scrupulously kept, and the boy was brought up

as the page of Magdalena, the wife of Don Luis.

In his third chapter Mr. Stirling, relying on ascertained truth, and eschewing all the tricks of historical romance, makes us equally familiar with his Majesty's other principal attendants. The gravest charge of all had been given to the Reverend Juan de Regla66 one of those monks, who knew how to make ladders to place and favor of the ropes which girt their ascetic loins. On being first introduced into the imperial presence, he chose to speak in the mitre-shunning cant of his cloth, of the great reluctance which he felt in occupying a post of such weighty responsibility. "Never fear," said Charles, somewhat maliciously; "before I left Flanders five doctors were engaged for a year in easing my conscience, so you will have nothing to answer for but what happens here."

The important post of private secretary was filled by Martin Gaztelu, and by him the whole confidential correspondence was carried on, as the Emperor himself could seldom do more than scrawl a few words with his chalky fingers. William van Male of Bruges was intimately admitted into the personnel, the heart and soul secrets of Charles. Long the first gentleman of the bedchamber, he had become part and parcel of the invalid's existence. This honest and learned man was the scholar and "Dominie of the society. He rendered to Charles, in the degree required, such literary services as Voltaire did to Frederick the Great. Il lavait son linge sale

or licked into shape the crude compositions of a royal master, who, although his education, born and bred in camps, had been neglected, was not without aspirations to twine the laurel of Apollo with that of Mars. Our Cæsar having, like Julius of old, written his own commentaries, Van Male converted the imperial French (of 1550) into elegant Latin. On another occasion Charles did into Spanish prose the French poem Le Chevalier Détermine, which translation Hernando de Acuña. by his direction, again turned into Castilian verse, and so much to his Majesty's content that he felt some desire to admit the reading world into a share of the intellectual treat. Nevertheless, however well satisfied with the works of his pen, and however ardently complimented thereon by his attendants, the monarch, it seems, trembled before the critic, and could not easily make up his mind to rush into print, shame the fools, and proclaim the august authorship. We most reluctantly pass over Mr. Stirling's pleasant particulars of the tricks and jokes played on the poor Fleming poet-laureat by the "windy

Spaniards," who made him a cat's-paw, and so magnified in the eyes of Charles the certain profits which must result from the publication, that the Emperor at last forced him to go to press, by which worthy Van Male was half ruined. In justice to the Emperor, it must be said that he sincerely meant to do a good turn to a faithful attendant, who for six years previously to his abdication had never quitted him by day or night. Oft when Charles, with over-worked brain and stomach, had, like Henry IV., frighted gentle sleep from his pillow, the weary scholar was summoned to the bedside to beguile the long hours by reading from the Vulgate, or by joining in a psalmodic duet, until his own health also broke down, to the no great displeasure of Charles, who loved him all the better from the congeniality of valetudinarianism, most courtier-like, although most unintentional. No man ever probed so deeply into the secret workings of the reserved and commanding mind of the Emperor as Van Male, who trembled, when writing to De Praet, at even the recollections of the mysterious confidences he made him. These accordingly, and very unhappily for history, are not revealed in his Letters-published at Brussels in 1843, by the Baron de Reiffenbach-which remarkable series, however, affords invaluable glimpses of the hero of the sixteenth age, as seen by the eyes of his valet. The hero, always very chary of his future fame, welcomed to Yuste another erudite virtuoso, a great friend of Van Male's, Juan Gines Sepulveda, who ventured in his sixtieth year to quit the sunny south and face the mud and mules of the Puerto Nuevo, without the imperial conveniences a step which nearly put an end to his beneficed and literary life. Charles was all through the centre of the circle, the observed of all observers and satellites, who, learned or unlearned, held him to be the greatest monarch and man that ever had been or ever could be; and that to name him was sufficient

Carlo quinto, ed è assai questo,
Perche si sa per tutto il mondo il resto.

The medical staff was commensurate with that of the kitchen. The resident physicianin-chief was Henry Mathys, a Fleming, who, on special consultations, was backed by Giovanni Mole, a Milanese, and Cornelio, a Spaniard. Their bulletins from day to day, and their prescriptions duly chronicled in dog and doctor Latin, and with "singular dulness and prolixity," are still preserved in the archives at Simancas. Nor must we omit

mention of another practitioner who administered to the mind of the patient, and by making him of a cheerful countenance, kept up his moral health, and reconciled to a wet or no-post day. To this Juanelo Torriano, a mechanician of Cremona, the keeping of the horological department had long been confided; he regulated the clocks and watches of Charles, who was as nice in the notation of his time to the fraction of a minute, as was our good old English-hearted King, George III. The Italian also constructed little figures that moved, birds that flew, and other ingenious toys, by which the prior and monks, who took him for a wizard, were scared out of such wits as they had, to the delight of the emperor, who took no less pleasure in this workshop than Louis XVI. did in forging locks and keys. Very pretty indeed is Dr. Robertson's story that Charles, on failing to make any two watches keep time together, confessed a penitential regret for ever having attempted to enforce a uniformity of religion; but alas! it is mere romance again; every day that he grew older his bigotry waxed the stronger, and no less so the expressions arguing his constant anxiety that all lost sheep might, by the help of good dogs and croziers, be got safe into, and duly sheared in, the one true Roman and Apostolical fold. Equally apocryphal is the Doctor's statement that Charles only "admitted a few neighbors to visits-and entertained them at table ;" an honor so opposed to Spanish etiquette that he never conceded it but once in all his life, and then in favor of Alva, the great and iron Duke of his day. As respects the Principal's rarity of visitors, even from the neighborhood-callers and guests were in fact exceedingly numerous-constantly arriving from all quarters, and many of them well worthy of Mr. Stirling's commemoration. Not the least assiduous was that once celebrated scion of a house that had given birth to kings and popes, and in whose bosom a congenial spirit burned, the already named Francesco de Borja, ex-duke of Gandia, the "miracle of princes," a saint among grandees and a grandee among saints; and some compensation was, indeed, owing to the Church from a family which had given her an Alexander VI. Born in 1510, our better Borgia early displayed a serious turn even at court, and was selected by Charles to convey the corpse of his empress from Toledo to Granada. When the coffin was opened to verify the body, the appalling death-change so affected the young nobleman, that he resolved to renounce the world,

"Filial affection and reverence shines like a grain of gold in the base metal of Philip's character; his father was the one wise and strong man who crossed his path whom he never suspected,

under-valued, or used ill.”

Mr. Stirling adds-rather too broadly"The repose of Charles cannot have been troubled with regrets for his resigned power, seeing that, in truth, he never resigned it at all, but wielded it at Yuste as firmly as he had wielded it at Augsburg or Toledo. He had given up little beyond the trappings of royalty, and his was not a mind to regret the pageant, the guards, and the gold sticks.'

Charles, however, without sacrificing the substance for the shadow, continued to take a keen interest in affairs of state. His wary eye swept from his convent watch-tower the entire horizon of Spanish politics; he considered himself the chamber-counsel and family adviser to his children; every day he looked for the arrival of the post with eager anxiety, nor did Gaztelu ever finish the packet without being asked if there were nothing more. Repeated and long were his interviews with the bearers of intelligence too important to be committed to ordinary channels; and when, shortly before his death, a courier arrived with a dispatch in cypher concealed in his stirrup leather, "he overwhelmed him with more questions than ever were put to the damsel Theodora"-the much interrogated heroine of a then popular novel. Meantime expresses succeeded expresses, and post with post came thick as hail. More than once did Philip dispatch from Flanders the great Ruy Gomez de Silva himself, the playmate of his youth, the most favored of his ministers, and the husband of his most favored mistress. Omitting the crowds of counts, queens-dowager, priests, place-hunters, and tuft-hunters of every hue -we may just observe that the great recluse ran no risk from the maggots which breed in an idle brain and torment the long hours of a too easy chair. It appears to us, now all the chaff and nonsense of historiographers has been winnowed, once for all, by a vigorous practitioner, that on the whole, a more rational or agreeable finale to "life's fitful fever," could hardly have been imagined than was realized at Yuste.

The convent-villa, with all its spiritual and fleshly appliances, was the beau-ideal of an Invalides for a good, prematurely old Spanish country gentleman of the sixteenth century-even so, indeed, long before had Hadrian, a Spaniard, retired, weary of state and worn in health, to his gardens and villa, to

console his declining days with the society of learned men, and with eating contrary to his doctor's advice. Charles was no beaten and dethroned usurper, pining in a foreign prison, and squabbling on his death-bed about rations with his jailer; neither was he a poor monk, wasted marrow and bone and all with vigils and fastings. The considerate father at Rome never stinted indulgences or flesh licenses, or evinced any want of consideration for the conscience or stomach of the most Catholic son of the Church. A solid party-wall separated the fires of his cheery palace-wing and its kitchen from the cold, hungry cell. Fray Carlos, no Ecclesiastes in practice, claimed the benefit of clergy just when and how he chose. IIe could at a moment lay aside the friar's rope, and appear decorated with the Golden Fleece and all the majesty that doth hedge a king. Sincerely religious, and animated by real faith, his attendances at chapel were a duty, a delight, and a soul-sentiment: not the now-aday routine and formalism of middle-aged widowhood or celibacy, which flies to the occupation of pew and prie-dieu to escape from the ennui of self. Charles, however, amidst all his popery, had never been other than a true Castilian; while he bowed dutifully to the Church so long as the thunders of the Vatican rolled in his favor, he never scrupled to dash the brutum fulmen from clerical hands when the Vicar of Christ bribed the Gaul or Turk to thwart his policy and undermine Spanish interests. He never failed to distinguish the priest from the prince, the spiritual from the temporal; and, accordingly, in 1525, he ordered masses to be said for the delivery of the Holy Pontiff, when one scrap from his own Secretary's pen could have thrown wide the gates at St. Angelo for the perjured potentate; nor did he, even in 1558, in all the increased sanctimony of his last days, ever forgive Alva for not visiting the perfidious firebrand Paul IV. with a wholesome correction, similar to that he had himself bestowed on Clement VII. In a word, the Emperor at Yuste was neither a misanthrope nor a dotard. Compelled, from physical reasons, to relinquish the Atlantean burden of the crown, he had retained all his relish for intellectual and innocent pursuits. He was no solitary anchorite; he brought with him his old servants and cooks, who knew his tastes and wants, and whose faces he knew. He had his anthems, his few favorite books, his roses, pictures, experiments, scourges, and hobbies. He had friends to tell his sorrows to, and divide