These occasional outbreaks were never witnessed in Philip.[2] He was exempted from them by the third element which we proposed to notice, and which, as nature takes precedence of habit, ought perhaps to have been the first.  A Spaniard by birth and education, a Spaniard in his sympathies and in his tastes, he had inherited, nevertheless, some of the peculiarities, intellectual as well as moral, of the other race to which by his origin, and, as we have already said, by his physical characteristics, he belonged.  He had none of the more pleasing qualities of the Netherlander; but he had the sluggish temper, the slow but laborious mind.  “He is phlegmatic as well from natural disposition as from will,” remarks an Italian contemporary.  “This king,” says another Venetian minister, “is absolutely free from every kind of passion.”  The word “passion” is here used in a strict, if not the most correct sense.  Philip could, perhaps, love; that he could hate is what no one has ever ventured to dispute; but never did either feeling, strong, persistent, indestructible, though it might be, rise in turbulent waves around his soul.  In religion he was a bigot,—­not a fanatic.  “The tranquillity of my dominions and the security of my crown,” he said, “rest on an unqualified submission in all essential points to the authority of the Holy See.”  In the same deliberate and impressive style, not in that of a wild and reckless frenzy, is his famous saying, “Better not to reign at all than to reign over heretics.”  His course in all matters of government was in conformity with the only chart by which he had been taught to steer.  He boasted that he was no innovator,—­that he did but tread in the footsteps of his father.  Nor, though he ever kept his object steadily in view, did he press towards it with undue haste.  He was content that time should smooth away the difficulties in his path.  “Time and myself against any other two” was not the maxim of a man who looked to effect great changes or who felt himself in danger of being driven from his course by the gusts of passion.

To a person of this character it mattered little, as far as the essentials of existence were concerned, whether his life were passed upon a throne or at an attorney’s desk.  In the latter situation, his fondness for using the pen would well have qualified him for the drudgery, his admirable patience would have been sufficiently exercised, and the mischief he was able to do would have been on a more contracted scale.  On the throne, his labors, as his admirers tell us, were those of “a poor clerk earning his bread,” while his recreations were those of a Jeronymite monk.  His intercourse with mankind was limited to the narrowest range of which his position would allow.  Even with his ministers he preferred to communicate in writing.  When he went abroad, it was in a carriage so constructed as to screen him entirely from view, and to shut out the world from his observation.  He always entered Madrid after nightfall, and reached his palace by streets that were the least frequented.  He had an equally strong aversion to bodily exercise.  Such was his love of quiet and seclusion, that it was commonly believed he waited only for a favorable opportunity to follow the example of his father, resign his power and withdraw to a convent.[3]