and a courtier, he was also an accomplished
scholar, and no inconsiderable statesman. He broke horses and trained
hawks as well as the most expert master of the menage and the mews; he
composed masses, which long kept their place in the cathedral-choirs of
Spain; he was well versed in polite learning, and deeply read in the
mathematics; he served in Africa and Italy with distinction; and as
viceroy of Catalonia he displayed abilities for business and
administration which in a few years would have enabled him to rival the
fame of Mendoza and De Lannoy. The pleasures and the honors of the
world, however, seemed, even from the first, to have but slender
attraction for the man so rarely fitted to obtain them. In the midst of
life and its triumphs, his thoughts perpetually turned upon death and
its mysteries. Ever punctilious in the performance of his religious
duties, he early began to take delight in spiritual contemplation, and
to discipline his mind by self-imposed penance. Even in his favorite
sport of falconry, he sought occasion for self-punishment by resolutely
fixing his eyes on the ground at the moment when he knew that his best
hawk was about to stoop upon the heron. These tendencies were fixed by
an incident which followed the death of the empress Isabella. As her
master of the horse, it was Borja's duty to attend the body from Toledo
to the chapel-royal of the cathedral of Granada, and to make oath of its
identity ere it was laid in the grave. But when the coffin was opened,
and the cerements drawn aside, the progress of decay was found to have
been so rapid, that the mild and lovely face of Isabella could no longer
be recognized by the most trusted and most faithful of her servants. His
conscience would not allow him to swear, that the mass of corruption
thus disclosed was the remains of his royal mistress, but only that
having watched day and night beside it, he felt convinced that it was
the same form which he had seen wrapped in its shroud at Toledo. From
that moment, in the twenty-ninth year of his prosperous life, he
resolved to spend what remained to him of time in earnest preparation
for eternity. A few years later, the death of his beautiful and
excellent wife strengthened his purpose, and snapped the dearest tie
which bound him to the world. Having completed the Jesuits' college at
Gandia, their first establishment of that kind in Europe, and having
married his son and his two daughters, he put his affai