ormity.

So much for the father. The son, Philip the Second, was a small,
meager man, much below the middle height, with thin legs, a narrow
chest, and the shrinking, timid air of a habitual invalid. He seemed
so little upon his first visit to his aunts, the Queens Eleanor and
Mary, accustomed to look upon proper men in Flanders and Germany, that
he was fain to win their favor by making certain attempts in the
tournament, in which his success was sufficiently problematical. "His
body," says his profest panegyrist, "was but a human cage, in which,
however brief and narrow, dwelt a soul to whose flight the
immeasurable expanse of heaven was too contracted." The same wholesale
admirer adds that "his aspect was so reverend that rustics who met him
alone in the wood, without knowing him, bowed down with instinctive
veneration." In face he was the living image of his father; having the
same broad forehead and blue eye, with the same aquiline, but better
proportioned, nose. In the lower part of the countenance the
remarkable Burgundian deformity was likewise reproduced: he had the
same heavy, hanging lip, with a vast mouth, and monstrously protruding
lower jaw. His complexion was fair, his hair light and thin, his beard
yellow, short, and pointed. He had the aspect of a Fleming, but the
loftiness of a Spaniard. His demeanor in public was still, silent,
almost sepulchral. He looked habitually on the ground when he
conversed, was chary of speech, embarrassed and even suffering in
manner. This was ascribed partly to a natural haughtiness, which he
had occasionally endeavored to overcome, and partly to habitual pains
in the stomach, occasioned by his inordinate fondness for pastry.

Such was the personal appearance of the man who was about to receive
into his single hand the destinies of half the world; whose single
will was, for the future, to shape the fortunes of every individual
then present, of many millions more in Europe, America, and at the
ends of the earth, and of countless millions yet unborn....

The Emperor then rose to his feet. Leaning on his crutch, he beckoned
from his seat the personage upon whose arm he had leaned as he
entered the hall. A tall, handsome youth of twenty-two came forward: a
man whose name from that time forward, and as long as history shall
endure, has been and will be more familiar than any other in the
mouths of Netherlanders. At that day he had rather a southern than a
German or Flemish app