His dejection now assumed the form of religious melancholy.  He began to devote every moment of his time to devotional reading and prayer, esteeming all amusements and all employments sinful which interfered with his spiritual exercises.  He expressed to the Bishop of Toledo his determination to devote, for the rest of his days, every moment to the service of God.  With the utmost scrupulousness he carried out this plan.  He practiced rigid fasts, and conformed to all the austerity of convent discipline.  He renounced his pension, and sitting at the abstemious table with the monks, declined seeing any other company than that of the world-renouncing priests and friars around him.  He scourged himself with the most cruel severity, till his back was lacerated with the whip.  He whole soul seemed to crave suffering, in expiation for his sins.  His ingenuity was tasked to devise new methods of mortification and humiliation.  Ambition had ever been the ruling passion of his soul, and now he was ambitious to suffer more, and to abuse himself more than any other mortal had ever done.

Goaded by this impulse, he at last devised the scheme of solemnising his own funeral.  All the melancholy arrangements for his burial were made; the coffin provided; the emperor reclined upon his bed as dead; he was wrapped in his shroud, and placed in his coffin.  The monks, and all the inmates of the convent attended in mourning; the bells tolled; requiems were chanted by the choir; the funeral service was read, and then the emperor, as if dead, was placed in the tomb of the chapel, and the congregation retired.  The monarch, after remaining some time in his coffin to impress himself with the sense of what it is to die, and be buried, rose from his tomb, kneeled before the altar for some time in worship, and then returned to his cell to pass the night in deep meditation and prayer.

The shock and the chill of this solemn scene were too much for the old monarch’s feeble frame and weakened mind.  He was seized with a fever, and in a few days breathed his last, in the 59th year of his age.  He had spent a little over three years in the convent.  The life of Charles V. was a sad one.  Through all his days he was consumed by unsatisfied ambition, and he seldom enjoyed an hour of contentment.  To his son he said—­

“I leave you a heavy burden; for, since my shoulders have borne it, I have not passed one day exempt from disquietude.”

Indeed it would seem that there could have been but little happiness for anybody in those dark days of feudal oppression and of incessant wars.  Ambition, intrigue, duplicity, reigned over the lives of princes and nobles, while the masses of the people were ever trampled down by oppressive lords and contending armies.  Europe was a field of fire and blood.  The cimeter of the Turk spared neither mother, maiden nor babe.  Cities and villages were mercilessly burned, cottages set in flames, fields of grain destroyed, and whole