instructive moral. Here are a despotic king and his confidential
minister laying their heads together in one cabinet; the viceroy of the
most important provinces of the realm, with his secretary, deeply
conferring in another, not as to the manner of advancing the great
interests, moral or material, of the people over whom God has permitted
them to rule, but as to the best means of arranging conspiracies against
the throne and life of a neighboring sovereign, with the connivance and
subsidies of the Pope. In this scheme, and in this only, the high
conspirators are agreed. In every other respect, mutual suspicion and
profound deceit characterize the scene. The Governor is filled with
inexpressible loathing for the whole nation of "drunkards and wineskins"
who are at the very moment strewing flowers in his path, and deafening
his ears with shouts of welcome; the king, while expressing unbounded
confidence in the viceroy, is doing his utmost, through the agency of the
subtlest intriguer in the world, to inveigle him into confessions of
treasonable schemes, and the minister is filling reams of paper with
protestations of affection for the governor and secretary, with sneers at
the character of the King, and with instructions as to the best method of
deceiving him, and then laying the despatches before his Majesty for
correction and enlargement. To complete the picture, the monarch and his
minister are seen urging the necessity of murdering the foremost man of
the age upon the very dupe who, within a twelvemonth, was himself to be
assassinated by the self-same pair; while the arch-plotter who controls
the strings of all these complicated projects is equally false to King,
Governor, and Secretary, and is engaging all the others in these blind
and tortuous paths, for the accomplishment of his own secret and most
ignoble aims.

In reply to the letters of Perez, Don John constantly expressed the
satisfaction and comfort which he derived from them in the midst of his