devotion, notwithstanding the tolerant spirit of her husband, she was warmly extolled by the Catholics.  Gregory XIII. called her the firm column of the Catholic faith, and Pius V. pronounced her worthy of being worshiped.  After the death of her husband she returned to Spain, to the bigoted court of her bigoted brother Philip.  Upon reaching Madrid she developed the spirit which dishonored her, in expressing great joy that she was once more in a country where no heretic was tolerated.  Soon after she entered a nunnery where she remained seven years until her death.

It is interesting briefly to trace out the history of the children of this royal family.  It certainly will not tend to make one any more discontented to move in a humbler sphere.  Maximilian left three daughters and five sons.

Anne, the eldest daughter, was engaged to her cousin, Don Carlos, only son of her uncle Philip, King of Spain.  As he was consequently heir to the Spanish throne, this was a brilliant match.  History thus records the person and character of Don Carlos.  He was sickly and one of his legs was shorter than the other.  His temper was not only violent, but furious, breaking over all restraints, and the malignant passions were those alone which governed him.  He always slept with two naked swords under his pillow, two loaded pistols, and several loaded guns, with a chest of fire-arms at the side of his bed.  He formed a conspiracy to murder his father.  He was arrested and imprisoned.  Choking with rage, he called for a fire, and threw himself into the flames, hoping to suffocate himself.  Being rescued, he attempted to starve himself.  Failing in this, he tried to choke himself by swallowing a diamond.  He threw off his clothes, and went naked and barefoot on the stone floor, hoping to engender some fatal disease.  For eleven days he took no food but ice.  At length the wretched man died, and thus Anne lost her lover.  But Philip, the father of Don Carlos, and own uncle of Anne, concluded to take her for himself.  She lived a few years as Queen of Spain, and died four years after the death of her father, Maximilian.

Elizabeth, the second daughter, was beautiful.  At sixteen years of age she married Charles IX., King of France, who was then twenty years old.  Charles IX. ascended the throne when but ten years of age, under the regency of his infamous mother, Catherine de Medici, perhaps the most demoniac female earth has known.  Under her tutelage, her boy, equally impotent in body and in mind, became as pitiable a creature as ever disgraced a throne.  The only energy he ever showed was in shooting the Protestants from a window of the Louvre in the horrible Massacre of St. Bartholomew, which he planned at the instigation of his fiend-like mother.  A few wretched years the youthful queen lived with the monster, when his death released her from that bondage.  She then returned to Vienna, a young and childless widow, but twenty years of age.  She built and endowed the splendid monastery of St. Mary de Angelis, and having seen enough of the pomp of the world, shut herself up from the world in the imprisonment of its cloisters, where she recounted her beads for nineteen years, until she died in 1592.