e qualities which colored the popular view of
his character. "The Life and Actions, Heroic and Pleasant, of the
invincible Emperor Charles V." was long a favorite chap-book in the Low
Countries. It relates how he defeated Solyman the magnificent, and how
he permitted a Walloon boor to obtain judgment against him for the value
of a sheep, killed by the wheels of his coach; how he charged the
Moorish horsemen at Tunis; and how he jested incognito with the woodmen
of Soigne. A similar impression, deepened by his reputation for
sanctity, he seems to have left behind him amongst the sylvan hamlets of
Estremadura.

In one point alone did Charles in the cell differ widely from Charles on
the throne. In the world, fanaticism had not been one of his vices; he
feared the keys no more than his cousin of England; and he confronted
the successor of St. Peter no less boldly than he made head against the
heir of St. Louis. When he held Clement VII. prisoner in Rome, he
permitted at Madrid the mockery of masses for that pontiff's speedy
deliverance. Against the Protestants he fought rather as rebels than as
heretics; and he frequently stayed the hand of the triumphant zealots of
the church. At Wittenberg, he set a fine example of moderation, in
forbidding the destruction of the tomb of Luther--saying, that he
contended with the living, and not with the dead. But once within the
walls of Yuste, and he assumed all the passions, and prejudices, and
superstitions of a friar. Looking back on his past life, he thanked God
for the evil that he had done in the matter of religious persecution,
and repented him, in sackcloth and ashes, of having kept his plighted
word to a heretic. Religion was the enchanted ground whereon that strong
will was paralyzed, and that keen intellect fell groveling in the dust.
Protestant and philosophic historians love to relate how Charles,
finding that no two of his time-pieces could be made to go alike,
remarked that he had perhaps erred in spending so much blood and
treasure in the hope of compelling men to uniformity in the more
difficult matter of religion. We fear the anecdote must have been
invented by some manufacturer of libels or panegyrics, such as Sleidan
and Jovius, whom Charles was wont to call his liars. No remark of equal
wisdom can be brought home to the lips of the Spanish Diocletian; nor
was the philosophy "of him who walked in the Salonian garden's noble
shade" ever heard amongst the litanies and