for business, he was not incapable of being amused. He
shot, hawked and hunted. He enjoyed with the delight of a true Spaniard
two delightful spectacles, a horse with its bowels gored out, and a
Jew writhing in the fire. The time came when the mightiest of instincts
ordinarily wakens from its repose. It was hoped that the young King
would not prove invincible to female attractions, and that he would
leave a Prince of Asturias to succeed him. A consort was found for
him in the royal family of France; and her beauty and grace gave him a
languid pleasure. He liked to adorn her with jewels, to see her dance,
and to tell her what sport he had had with his dogs and his falcons. But
it was soon whispered that she was a wife only in name. She died;
and her place was supplied by a German princess nearly allied to the
Imperial House. But the second marriage, like the first, proved
barren; and, long before the King had passed the prime of life, all
the politicians of Europe had begun to take it for granted in all their
calculations that he would be the last descendant, in the male line,
of Charles the Fifth. Meanwhile a sullen and abject melancholy took
possession of his soul. The diversions which had been the serious
employment of his youth became distasteful to him. He ceased to find
pleasure in his nets and boar spears, in the fandango and the bullfight.
Sometimes he shut himself up in an inner chamber from the eyes of his
courtiers. Sometimes he loitered alone, from sunrise to sunset, in the
dreary and rugged wilderness which surrounds the Escurial. The hours
which he did not waste in listless indolence were divided between
childish sports and childish devotions. He delighted in rare animals,
and still more in dwarfs. When neither strange beasts nor little men
could dispel the black thoughts which gathered in his mind, he repeated
Aves and Credos; he walked in processions; sometimes he starved himself;
sometimes he whipped himself. At length a complication of maladies
completed the ruin of all his faculties. His stomach failed; nor was
this strange; for in him the malformation of the jaw, characteristic of
his family, was so serious that he could not masticate his food; and
he was in the habit of swallowing ollas and sweetmeats in the state in
which they were set before him. While suffering from indigestion he
was attacked by ague. Every third day his convulsive tremblings, his
dejection, his fits of wandering, seemed to indicat