e
Spanish physicians were then, as many of them are said to be still, as
far behind the world in surgery as in other things; and indeed surgery
itself was then in its infancy, because men, ever since the early Greek
schools of Alexandria had died out, had been for centuries feeding their
minds with anything rather than with facts. Therefore the learned
morosophs who were gathered round Don Carlos's sick bed had become
according to their own confession, utterly confused, terrified, and at
their wits' end.

It is the 7th of May, the eighteenth day after the accident according to
Olivarez's story: he and Dr Vega have been bleeding the unhappy prince,
enlarging the wound twice, and torturing him seemingly on mere guesses.
"I believe," says Olivarez, "that all was done well: but as I have said,
in wounds in the head there are strange labyrinths." So on the 7th they
stand round the bed in despair. Don Garcia de Toledo, the prince's
faithful governor, is sitting by him, worn out with sleepless nights, and
trying to supply to the poor boy that mother's tenderness which he has
never known. Alva, too, is there, stern, self-compressed, most terrible,
and yet most beautiful. He has a God on earth, and that is Philip his
master; and though he has borne much from Don Carlos already, and will
have to bear more, yet the wretched lad is to him as a son of God, a
second deity, who will by right divine succeed to the inheritance of the
first; and he watches this lesser deity struggling between life and death
with an intensity of which we, in these less loyal days, can form no
notion. One would be glad to have a glimpse of what passed through that
mind, so subtle and so ruthless, so disciplined and so loyal withal: but
Alva was a man who was not given to speak his mind, but to act it.

One would wish, too, for a glimpse of what was passing through the mind
of another man, who has been daily in that sick chamber, according to
Olivarez's statement, since the first of the month: but he is one who has
had, for some years past, even more reason than Alva for not speaking his
mind. What he looked like we know well, for Titian has painted him from
the life--a tall, bold, well-dressed man, with a noble brain, square and
yet lofty, short curling locks and beard, an eye which looks as though it
feared neither man nor fiend--and it has had good reason to fear both--and
features which would be exceeding handsome, but for the defiant
snub-nose.