the storm should only have blown over for a time. He
fell, possibly, into hasty disgust at the folly of mankind, and despair
of arousing them to use their common sense, and acknowledge their true
interest and their true benefactors. At all events, he threw into the
fire--so it is said--all his unpublished manuscripts, the records of long
years of observation, and renounced science thenceforth.

We hear of him after this at Brussels, and at Basle likewise--in which
latter city, in the company of physicians, naturalists, and Grecians, he
must have breathed awhile a freer air. But he seems to have returned
thence to his old master Charles V., and to have finally settled at
Madrid as a court surgeon to Philip II., who sent him, but too late, to
extract the lance splinters from the eye of the dying Henry II.

He was now married to a lady of rank from Brussels, Anne van Hamme by
name; and their daughter married in time Philip II.'s grand falconer, who
was doubtless a personage of no small social rank. He was well off in
worldly things; somewhat fond, it is said, of good living and of luxury;
inclined, it may be, to say, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we
die," and to sink more and more into the mere worldling, unless some
shock awoke him from his lethargy.

And the awakening shock did come. After eight years of court life, he
resolved early in the year 1564 to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

The reasons for so strange a determination are wrapped in mystery and
contradiction. The common story was that he had opened a corpse to
ascertain the cause of death, and that, to the horror of the bystanders,
the heart was still seen to beat; that his enemies accused him to the
Inquisition, and that he was condemned to death, a sentence which was
commuted to that of going on pilgrimage. But here, at the very outset,
accounts differ. One says that the victim was a nobleman, name not
given; another that it was a lady's maid, name not given. It is most
improbable, if not impossible, that Vesalius, of all men, should have
mistaken a living body for a dead one; while it is most probable, on the
other hand, that his medical enemies would gladly raise such a calumny
against him, when he was no longer in Spain to contradict it. Meanwhile
Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, makes no mention of Vesalius
having been brought before its tribunal, while he does mention Vesalius'
residence at Madrid. Another story is, that he