Carlos was emaciated, and apparently weak from long confinement; and had sunk exhausted upon a seat as he ceased to speak; but when he heard these words of the Prior, he rose up calm, firm, and collected; no longer passionate or excited, but yet with the light of a clear conscience in his face, and the dignity of a prince in his air and attitude.

'I thank thee, father,' he said. Although I cannot lay to my soul the crimes, for which, it would appear, I am to suffer, yet I am but a poor sinful mortal, whose best actions fall so far short of the high standard of divine excellence, as to be little better than sins. God permits a portion of his creatures to remain upon earth until they have earned themselves a deathless name among men, and laid up for themselves a title, as it were, to salvation by their good deeds. Others he takes from the world in the morning of their days, before the blossom of their virtue has had time to ripen into fruit. I had fondly hoped that the second Charles, if he did not equal the first in martial fame or extent of empire, might yet live to raise to himself an equally enduring monument of glory, in the affections and prosperity of his people. But the will of God be done.'

'Better thus, better thus,' exclaimed the Prior. 'The warm blood of youth beats in thy pulses, and life is to thee full of hope; but I tell thee, I, who have "sounded all the depths and shallows" of glory, I tell thee, as our legends aver the Calif Ab

derahman left it in legacy to his son El Hakkam, that he who lives the longest and drinks the deepest draught of power, does but gain the keener sense of the nothingness of earth. Would you seek to conquer fame in the ensanguined field? Like Annibal, to be deluded, perhaps, with a season of triumph, and after expending a long life in the defence of your country, to die at last a miserable exile? Like Charles, to look for happiness in the fascinating splendors of war, and when everything is gained and tried, to fling it contemptuously to the earth? Or would you earn imperishable laurels by the arts of peace? To see your best actions blackened by inventive malice, your slightest indiscretion magnified into a crime, friends whom you deemed the truest proving false, and the light of woman's love, should it beam in its brilliancy and beauty on your path, extinguished prematurely by the hand of death?—No, Don Carlos; resign thee to die, when the summons comes, not only because it is God's will, but because it is best that such should be the will of God.'

Carlos kneeled before the Prior, confessed his sins, and received those rites of absolution and of preparation for another world, which the doctrines of the Roman Catholic faith prescribe. He remained absorbed in mental prayer, when the Prior left the prison. The sound of the monk's footsteps had just died away in the corridor, when the Prince was aroused from his abstraction to but momentary

consciousness, by the blow of a poniard, which terminated his life with scarce an instant of pain, and ere he could observe by whom the blow was given, and of course without his having any opportunity, if he had possessed the inclination, to struggle for his life. His body was conveyed by the agents of the Holy Office to the palace, to be, in the sequel, interred in the royal vaults of the Escorial. If the unnatural father, who, from jealousy of the fame or personal charms of his son, commanded or sanctioned his death, mustered sufficient resolution to glance, with mingled agony of madness and grief, at the yet warm corpse of the Prince, with the weapon of death remaining sheathed as it were in the heart of its victim, yet the access of fury, which nerved him to the effort, gave place to sentiments of a different kind when the purpose of his cruelty was accomplished. He flew from the sight of the Prince's remains, to pour out his gushing feelings in the sacred recesses of his private oratorio. He thought of the brilliant qualities of Don Carlos; of his lineage and succession cut off, of the horrid circumstances of his death, and the effect it might have upon the people, of the indignation of a justly offended God.

As these reflections passed through the mind of Philip, he, mechanically as it were, sunk on his knees at the feet of the Virgin, and with clasped hands and closed eyes, poured out his heart before her in humble supplication, interrupted by sobs of irre15

VOL. I.

pressible grief. He was suddenly checked by the sound of a slight laugh in the small apartment, followed by the scornful interrogatory,- And is this Philip of Spain, whom I see grovelling in the earth like men of meaner mould?'

Rage and vexation absorbed every other emotion in Philip's breast at these insulting words, and his hand slid to his dagger in the first impulse of the moment, that he might strike the audacious intruder dead. But when he started to his feet, he saw only the Prior of San Lorenzo, who stood with his arms folded, as if he neither feared nor respected the resentment of the King.

'What means this intrusion?' angrily demanded Philip.

'I come,' said the Prior, 'to witness thy tardy repentance: tardy, since unless tears might restore the dead, they little avail against the long record of guilt, which every hour of thy life accumulates.'

Spare me, O spare me, father, I intreat thee. Think of the death of Carlos,-its fatal cause, its unnatural manner, the curse that men pronounce upon me living, the stigma that history will affix to my name, and, O! close not upon me the prospect of making my peace with heaven.'

'Peace with heaven, sayest thou?-Reflect, remember, Don Felipe of Spain:-What shrift had thy murdered wife Catalina? What peace had he, whom the inexorable laws of Castilian honor compelled to part from that sainted victim of thy arts?'

Philip trembled and shrunk back at these words, as if touched with a searing iron; but not a syllable escaped his lips.

"Thou knewest,' the Prior continued, 'thou knewest well that the sense of honor was the dearest passion in the bosom of Diego Garcia, and that next to it was the love he bore to his wife and to her only child. Thou knewest,-for did not the Emperor himself recount the whole story to thee point by point?-that when Doña Mencia Sol gave her hand to the Count of Logroño, shocked by the seeming wantonness, caprice, and perfidy of her in whose fond smiles he lived, Don Diego buried himself in the cloister, swearing eternal hatred to the sex; that when accident disclosed to him at the confessional the treacherous and abominable means by which Gaspar de Pimentel had constrained his niece to a union she loathed, the Count of Orotava procured a dispensation of his vows and issued forth to the world on a mission of vengeance; that he tracked his enemy from one end of the New World to the other, traversing and defeating that enemy's plans at every step, until Gaspar returned to Spain a broken, desperate, man, and became the chief of a band of robbers in the Alpujarras, where Don Diego encountered him in his lair, and gave him as a last favor, what the felon little deserved, the chances of an honorable death; that restored now in his own estimation, the Count of Orotava resumed his appropriate station in the world, and