Christopher Columbus had discovered America, or that the English
were not Mahometans. In his youth, however, though too imbecile
for study or for business, he was not incapable of being amused.
He shot, hawked and hunted. He enjoyed with the delight of a true
Spaniard two delightful spectacles, a horse with its bowels gored
out, and a Jew writhing in the fire. The time came when the
mightiest of instincts ordinarily wakens from its repose. It was
hoped that the young King would not prove invincible to female
attractions, and that he would leave a Prince of Asturias to
succeed him. A consort was found for him in the royal family of
France; and her beauty and grace gave him a languid pleasure. He
liked to adorn her with jewels, to see her dance, and to tell her
what sport he had had with his dogs and his falcons. But it was
soon whispered that she was a wife only in name. She died; and
her place was supplied by a German princess nearly allied to the
Imperial House. But the second marriage, like the first, proved
barren; and, long before the King had passed the prime of life,
all the politicians of Europe had begun to take it for granted in
all their calculations that he would be the last descendant, in
the male line, of Charles the Fifth. Meanwhile a sullen and
abject melancholy took possession of his soul. The diversions
which had been the serious employment of his youth became
distasteful to him. He ceased to find pleasure in his nets and
boar spears, in the fandango and the bullfight. Sometimes he shut
himself up in an inner chamber from the eyes of his courtiers.
Sometimes he loitered alone, from sunrise to sunset, in the
dreary and rugged wilderness which surrounds the Escurial. The
hours which he did not waste in listless indolence were divided
between childish sports and childish devotions. He delighted in
rare animals, and still more in dwarfs. When neither strange