r of these apostilles, always confused, wordy and
awkward, was sometimes very ludicrous; nor did it improve after his
thirty or forty years' daily practice in making them. Thus, when he
received a letter from France in 1589, narrating the assassination
of Henry III., and stating that "the manner in which he had been
killed was that a Jacobin monk had given him a pistol-shot in the
head" (la facon qua l'on dit qu'il a ette tue, sa ette par un
Jacobin qui luy a donna d'un cou de pistolle dans la tayte), he
scrawled the following luminous comment upon the margin.
Underlining the word "pistolle," he observed, "this is perhaps some
kind of knife; and as for 'tayte,' it can be nothing else but head,
which is not tayte, but tete, or teyte, as you very well know"
(quiza de alguna manera de cuchillo, etc., etc.)--Gachard. Rapport
a M. le Minist. de l'Interieur, prefixed to corresp. Philippe II.
Vol. I. xlix. note 1. It is obvious that a person who made such
wonderful commentaries as this, and was hard at work eight or nine
hours a day for forty years, would leave a prodigious quantity of
unpublished matter at his death.]

He often remained at the council-board four or five hours at a time, and
he lived in his cabinet. He gave audiences to ambassadors and deputies
very willingly, listening attentively to all that was said to him, and
answering in monosyllables. He spoke no tongue but Spanish; and was
sufficiently sparing of that, but he was indefatigable with his pen. He
hated to converse, but he could write a letter eighteen pages long, when
his correspondent was in the next room, and when the subject was,
perhaps, one which a man of talent could have settled with six words of
his tongue. The world, in his opinion, was to move upon protocols and
apostilles. Events had no right to be born throughout his dominions,
without a preparatory course of his obstetrical pedantry. He could never
learn that the earth would not rest on its axis, while he wrote a
programme of the way it was to turn. He was slow in deciding, slower in
communicating his decisions. He was prolix with his pen, not from
affluence, but from paucity of ideas. He took refuge in a cloud of words,
sometimes to conceal his meaning, oftener to conceal the absence of any
meaning, thus mystifying not only others but himself. To one great
purpose, formed early, he adhered inflexibly. This, however, was rather
an instinct th