The first printed account of Charles at Yuste, and hitherto the best, is to be found in Joseph de Siguenza's comprehensive history of St. Jerome and his order. The learned author of this monastic classic, born in 1545, and the friend of many who had known the Emperor intimately, was appointed the first prior of the Escurial by Philip II., who held him to be the greatest wonder of that monastery, itself the eighth wonder of the world; and there to this day his thoughtful portrait, painted by Coello, hangs in the identical cell in which he lived so long and wrote so much and so well. "Of the existence of Siguenza," says Mr. Stirling, "Dr. Robertson does not appear to have been aware;" but very possibly, had the book itself (or rather a translation of it) come into his hands, the Principal would have run over this MS. was deposited in the archives of the foreign office at Paris. Mr. Stirling, not as yet contemplating the performance before us, but anxious to solve a collateral question, went there in the summer of 1850, and endeavored in vain to conciliate the good offices of some literati commonly supposed to take a special concern in historical inquiries. No help from them!--but on a subsequent visit in winter, his application for permission found favor with President Bonaparte himself and being further backed by Lord Normanby and M. Drouyn de Lhuys, who interested themselves in "getting the order obeyed by the unwilling officials," our author at last grasped in his hands the dragon-guarded MS.--and found it a real prize. Its writer, Canon Thomas Gonzalez, was intrusted by Ferdinand VII. with the custody and reconstruction of the national archives at Siman-it with no careful eye-for it seems to have cas, after the expulsion of the French invaders, whose plunderings and dislocations M. Gachard has truly described. Don Thomas fully availed himself of his unlimited access to treasures which had been so long sealed alike to natives and foreigners by the suspicious government of Madrid. Hence the MS. now in question--entitled "Memoir of Charles at Yuste." Gonzalez himself supplied little more than the thread on which the pearls were strung--leaving it, as far as possible, for the actors to tell their own tale in their own words-in short he depended substantially on the correspondence that passed between the Courts at Valladolid and Brussels and the retired Emperor and his household. More authentic evidence cannot consequently exist; the dead, after three centuries of cold obstruction, are summoned to the bar of history-for sooner or later everything shall be known. Unfortunately the full bowl was dashed from Mr. Stirling's lips by his not being allowed to "transcribe any of the original documents, the French Government [M. Mignet?] having entertain-chief and foremost personage, the centre and ed the design of publishing the entire work;" -a project which the Ledru-Rollin revolution of 1848 had retarded, and which this English forestalling may possibly not adMeantime until the MS. Memoir be printed in extenso-which we hope ultimately will be the case-we must, and may well, content ourselves with its having supplied the groundwork and chief materials of Mr. Stirling's volume-which, moreover, collects and arranges for us illustrations from a multitude of other sources, all critically examined, and many of them, no doubt, familiar of old to the owner of the rich Spanish library at Keir. vance. been one of the dogmas of his creed that cynosure, in this most remarkable period. The accident of birth had indeed thrust greatness on him. The sun never set on the dominions in the old and new world of one man, who, when he assumed Plus Ultra for his motto, striking the negative from the pillared limits which bounded the ambition of a demigod, gave to other monarchs a significative hint that his had none;-and fortune, when a king of France was his prisoner at Madrid, a Pope his captive in Rome itself, seemed to favor his gigantic aspirations. In later times abdication has so often been made the escape of weak and bad rulers, legitimate and illegitimate, that we must place ourselves | cluse in the Guadarama. With the royal in the sixteenth century and think and feel as daughters of Spain the confessor so regumen then did, if we desire fully to understand larly replaced the lover, that the convent, as the thunderclap effect produced when this a finale, became the rule. Nor was this mormonopolist of fame and power, this Cæsar bidly religious disposition confined to royaland Charlemagne of his day, altogether vo- ties; it has at all times peopled lauras, herluntarily, and like Diocletian of old, his pro- mitages, and cloisters of Spain with her best totype and parallel in infinite particulars, de- and bravest sons. In that semi-oriental nascended from so many thrones-exchanging tion, a desire to withdraw from the worldcare-lined ermine for the cowl, and burying weariness to the shadow of some great rock, himself for ever, far from courts and camps, grows as youth wears away-with love and in the solitude of a mountain cloister. war in its train;-then the peculiar Desengaño, the disenchantment, the finding out the stale, flat, and unprofitable vanity of vanities, urges the winding up a life of action by repose, and an atonement for sensuality by mortification. When the earlier stimulants are no longer efficient, abodes and offices of penance furnish a succedaneum to the uneducated and resourceless :-nor, in truth, can anything be more impressive than the hermit-sites of the Vierzos and Montserrats of the Peninsula-their unspeakable solace of solitude, so congenial to disappointed spirits, who, condemning and lamenting the earthly pleasures that they have outlived, depart from the crowd, their affections set Charles, in bidding farewell to so much greatness, did not take the solemn step without due deliberation. He, too, like the recluse of Spalatro, had long meditated on such a conclusion, as one devoutly to be wished for; and now, when he felt his physical forces gradually giving way, worn as a scabbard by the steel of an over-active intellect-now when Philip, trained in his school, was in full vigor of mind and body, he felt the moment had at length come for shifting from his bending shoulders "a load would sink a navy," and preparing himself for heaven by the concentrated contemplation of that valley and shadow through which he must ere long pass. Such a yearning was as much in accordance with Spanish character in general as with his own particular idiosyncrasies. A similar tendency marked the earliest Gothic sovereigns of Christianized Spain. Elurico, king of the Suevi, died a monk in 583-and his immediate successor, Andeca, imitated the example; Wamba assumed the cowl at Pampliega, where he expired in 682; Bermudo I. went to his grave in 791 a friar; Alphonso IV., surnamed the Monk, followed in 930-as did Ramiro II. in 950. St. Ferdinand, one of the best and greatest of Spanish kings, delighted to spend intervals of pensive quietude among the brethren of St. Facundus. The hypochondrianism evident in Enrique IV. passed through his sister, the pious Isabel, to her daughter Juana La Loca (Crazy Jane), the mother of two emperors and four queens. She lived and died in the nunnery of Tordesillas, and the malady transmitted to her son Charles became fixed in the Spanish line of the Austrian blood to its close. Philip II. lived and died virtually a monk, in his Escurial; his son Philip III. vegetated a weak bigot, as did his weaker grandson Charles II. The taint crossed the Pyrenees with Anne of Austria, whose son, Louis XIV., the Grand Monarque, died every inch a monk, while his grandson, Philip V., first abdicated, then ended a melancholy re above to mourn o'er sin, And find, for outward Eden lost, a paradise within. Charles, even in the prime of life, had settled with his beloved Empress that they would both retire from the world and from each other so soon as their children were grown up. He had long prepared himself for monastic habits. During Lents he withdrew, when at Toledo, to the convent La Sisla, and when at Valladolid to a monastery near Abrujo, at which he built quarters for his reception: nay, fifteen years before he abdicated, he confided his intention to his true friend Francesco de Borja-himself, by and by, a memorable example of pomp-renouncing reflexion. The Emperor selected the Order of St. Jerome, hospitable rather than ascetic; and appears to have soon listened with special attention to the praises of their establishment at Yuste. He caused the site to be examined some twelve years before he finally determined-nor could any locality have been better chosen. If Spain herself, unvisiting and unvisited, was the recluse of Europe, her remote Estremadura-extrema ora-became naturally the very Thebais for native anchorites. Here, indeed, the Romans of old had placed their capital Merida, a "little Rome," and the district under the Moors was a garden and granary; but administra tive neglect and the emigration of the multi- | meneals simultaneously illumined by the autudes who followed their countrymen, Cortez tos de fe of the Spanish Inquisition. The and Pizarro, to the "diggings" of the new ambition of Charles, when he now prepared world, ere long grievously impoverished to shift the burdens of actual sovereignty and depopulated the province, where from his own shoulder, was transferred, not absit omen!-to this day uncultivated and extinguished; in exact proportion as he pantuninhabited leagues of fertile land remained to denude himself of empire, he was anxovergrown with aromatic bush, the heritage of the wild bee. The Hieronomite convent, so extolled to the Emperor, stands -or rather stood-about seven leagues from "pleasant" Placencia, a town most picturesquely placed in a bosom of beauty and plenty, girdled by snow-capped sierras, moated by trout-streams, and clothed with forests of chestnut, mulberries, and orange. The fraternity had nestled on a park-like hillslope which sheltered devotion from the wind, and still, basking in the sunny south, sweeps over the boundless horizon of the Vera-where spring indeed is perpetual. So much for the "St. Justus seated in a vale of no great extent," of Dr. Robertson, who, blundering from the threshold to the catastrophe, mistakes a Canterbury saint for a Castilian streamlet, the Yuste, which descending behind the monastery had given it its name. ious to aggrandize his son. His health had In 1554, Charles, then in Flanders, finally Ill health detained the ex-monarch nearly a year longer in Flanders, which he finally quitted, September 13, 1556. His exit was imperial. He was accompanied by his two sisters, the dowager queens of Hungary and France, who indeed wished to be permanent sharers of his retirement, and was attended by a suite of one hundred and fifty persons, and a fleet of fifty-six sail. He reached Laredo on the 28th. Robertson prostrates him on the ground at landing-eager to salute the common mother of mankind, to whom he now returned naked as he was born. Neither is there the slightest foundation for this episode, nor for the Doctor's diatribes on the neglect be met in Spain. He was indeed put to a little inconvenience, from hav * See the paper in Mr. Burgon's industrious biog ing appeared sooner than was expected, and before adequate preparations were complete, in about the poorest part of a country always in want of everything at the critical moment:'-matters, however, speedily mended on the arrival of his chamberlain, an experienced campaigner, and cunning in the commissariat. The cavalcade set forth over some of the wildest mountain-passes in Spain -through poverty-stricken districts, where stones are given for bread, where the rich are sent empty away, and then, as now, miserably unprovided even with such accommodation for man or beast as Spaniards and their locomotive, the mule, alone could or can endure. Oh! dura tellus Iberia !' Charles, sick and gouty, travelled by short stages of ten to fifteen miles a-day, sometimes in a chair carried by men, at other times in a litter. The identical palanquin in which his Catholic Majesty was 'cribbed, cabined, and confined,' during this Cæsarean operation, is still preserved in the Armeria at Madrid; something between a black trunk and a coffin, it is infinitely less comfortable than the elegant articles furnished by Mr. Banting. His progress, the vehicle notwithstanding, was right regal. Provinces and cities emptied themselves to do homage, and he entered Burgos, the time-honored capital of Castile, amid pealing bells and a general illumination: here he remained two days, holding a perpetual levee, highly delighted, and with every wish anticipated. So much for Dr. Robertson's moving tale of the deep affliction of Charles at his son's ingratitude,' and the forced residence at Burgos for 'some weeks' before Philip paid the first moiety of the small pension which was all he had reserved of so many kingdomswith the tragical addition that the said delay prevented him rewarding or dismissing his suite, which, in fact, he neither did nor wished to do here. At Cabezon he was met by his grandson, the ill-omened Don Carlos, of whom he formed a bad but correct first impression, and forthwith recommended to the regent Juana 'an unsparing use of the rod; the boy already, at eleven years of age, evinced unmistakeable symptoms of a sul len passionate temper. He lived in a state of perpetual rebellion against his aunt, and displayed from the nursery the weakly mischievous spirit which marked his short career at his father's court.' Mr. Stirling properly treats all the love for his father's wife, and his consequent murder, as the contemptible fictions of malevolent ignorance, though adopted and revived of late by the Al VOL. XXIX. NO. I. fieris, Schillers, and other illustrious dramatists. Charles entered Valladolid, where the court was residing, without parade, but by the usual gate. It would be a shame,' said he, not to let his people see him—a cause and monument of his country's greatness. He was received by all, high and low, most deferentially, and held frequent cabinet councils. On resuming his journey, he thanked God that he was getting beyond the reach of ceremony, and that henceforward no more visits were to be made, no more receptions to be undergone.' He now approached the wild and rugged Sierra de Bejar, one of the backbones of the Peninsula; yet rather than face the episcopal and municipal civilities of Placencia, to which Dr. Robertson takes him, he braved a shorter cut, over an alpine pass which might have scared a chamois or contrabandista-a route which recalled the miseries of his flight to Inspruck, and is almost described by Lactantius, in his account of the journey of Diocletian to Nicomedia :-' Cum jam felicitas ab eo recessisset, impatiens et æger animi, profectus hyeme, sæviente frigore, atque imbribus verberatus, morbum levem et perpetuum traxit, vexatusque per omne iter lecticâ plurimum vehebatur.' (De Morte Persec., xvii.) Mr. Stirling paints like a true artist the toppling crags, the torrents, and precipices amidst which nature sits enthroned in all her sublimity, with her wildest and loveliest forms broad-cast about her, where least seen, as if in scorn for the insect man and his admiration. When at length the cavalcade crept, like a wounded snake, to the culminating crest, and the promised land, the happy Rasselas valley, lay unrolled as a map beneath him- this is indeed the Vera,' exclaimed Charles, to reach which surely some suffering might be borne.' Then turning back on the mountain gorges of the Puerto Nuevo, which frowned behind, and thinking, as it were, of the gates of the world closed on him for ever: 'Now,' added he, I shall never go through pass again.' He reached Xarandilla before sunset, and alighted at the castle of the Count of Oropesa, the great feudal lord of the district. Here he remained the whole winter-fretting and fuming at the delays in the completion of the new wing at Yuste, which had been begun three years before, and which Mr. Cubitt would have put out of hand in three months. The weather was severe; but while the winds and rain beat out of doors, and the imperial suite waded in waterproof boots, the great man 2 himself, wrapped in robes wadded with eider down, sat by a blazing fire, and discussed heavy affairs of state for the public benefit, and heavier dinners and suppers for his private injury. The outlandish attendants almost mutinied from discontent; the chosen paradise of the master was regarded as a sort of hell upon earth by the servants; they yearned for home, and dragging at each step a weightier chain, sighed as they remembered their sweet Belgian Argos. Yet, if Spaniards have written their annals true, these said Belgians and Hollanders looked plump and fair, and fed as voraciously as if they had been Jews upon the unctuous hams and griskins of Montanches. Estremadura is indeed a porcine pays de Cocagne, an Elysium of the pig, a land overflowing with savory snakes for his summer improvement, and with sweet acorns for his autumnal perfectionment; whence results a flesh fitter for demigods than Dutchmen, and a fat, tinted like melted topazes-a morsel for cardinals and wise men of the West. Tel maitre tels valets-and Charles set his faithful followers a magnificent example: his worst disease was an inordinate appetite, and his most besetting sin the indulgence thereofedacitas damnosu. Nor did he voluntarily repudiate the old Belgic respect for god Bacchus. So long back as 1532, his spiritual adviser "had bidden him beware of fish"-but added that he must be more moderate in his cups; or else both mind and body would go down hill-" cuesta abajo." The habits of the Heliogabalic hermit are thus racily described. by our genial author: "Roger Ascham, standing "hard by the imperial table at the feast of the Golden Fleece," watched with wonder the Emperor's progress through "sod beef, roast mutton, baked hare;" after which, "he fed well of a capon," drinking also, says the Fellow of St. John's," the best that ever I saw. He had his head in the glass five times as long as any of them, and never drank less than a good quart at once of Rhenish wine." Eating was now the only physical gratification which he could still enjoy or was unable last on rich dishes, against which his ancient and trusty confessor, Cardinal Loaysa, had protested a quarter of a century before. to resist. He continued, therefore, to dine to the "The supply of his table was a main subject of the correspondence between the mayordomo and the Secretary of State. The weekly courier from Valladolid to Lisbon was ordered to change his route that he might bring every Thursday a provision of eels and other rich fish (pescado grueso) for Friday's fast. There was a constant demand for anchovies, tunny, and other potted fish, and sometimes a complaint that the trouts of the country were too small: the olives, on the other hand, were too large-and the Emperor wished, instead, for olives of Perejon. One day the Secretary of State is asked for some partridges from Gama, a the Count of Orsono once sent him into Flanders place from whence the Emperor remembers that some of the best partridges in the world. Another day, sausages were wanted" of the kind which the Queen Juana, now in glory, used to pride herself on making, in the Flemish fashion, at Tordesillas," and for the receipt for which the Secretary is referred to the Marquis of Denia. Both orders were punctually executed. The sausages, although sent to a land supreme in that manufacture, gave great satisfaction. Of the partridges the Emperor said that they used to be better-ordering, however, the remainder to be pickled. The Emperor's weakness being generally known, or soon discovered, dainties of all kinds were sent to him as presents. Mutton, pork, and game were the prothey were dear. The bread was indifferent, and visions most easily obtained at Xarandilla; but nothing was good and abundant but chestnuts, the staple food of the people. But in a very few days the castle larder wanted for nothing. One day the Count of Oropesa sent an offering of game; another day a pair of fat calves arrived from the Archbishop of Zaragoza. The Archbishop of Toledo and the Duchess of Frias were constant and magnificent in their gifts of venison, fruit, and lar intervals from Seville and from Portugal. preserves, and supplies of all kinds came at regu "Luis Quixada, who knew the Emperor's habits and constitution well, beheld with dismay these long trains of mules laden, as it were, with gout and bile. He never acknowledged the receipt of the good things from Valladolid without adding and along with an order he sometimes conveyed some dismal forebodings of consequent mischief; a hint that it would be much better if no means were found of executing it. If the Emperor made a hearty meal without being the worse for it, the mayordomo noted the fact with exultation, and refor plovers, which he considered harmless. But marked with complacency His Majesty's fondness his office of purveyor was more commonly exercised under protest; and he interposed between his master and an eel-pie as, in other days, he would have thrown himself between the imperial person and the point of a Moorish lance." So much for " his table neat and plain". according to Dr. Robertson-(sheeps-head and oat-bannocks to wit!)-and here, if space permitted, we might point out to hero-worshippers other great men, on whose crests sat plumed victory, of even greater appetite, and who, succumbing to the spit, dug their graves with their teeth. We might compare the pickled tunny and iced beer of the invincible Charles with the polentas and fiery condiments of Frederick the Great, who planned a battle or a bill of fare with equal skill and solicitude; who appointed for each different dish or defile a different cook or colonel. Charles paid no less attention to medicine than to the menu-to the antidote than |