It is the 7th of May, the eighteenth day after the accident, according to Olivarez’ story:  he and Dr. Vega have been bleeding the unhappy prince, enlarging the wound twice, and torturing him seemingly on mere guesses.  “I believe,” says Olivarez, “that all was done well:  but as I have said, in wounds in the head there are strange labyrinths.”  So on the 7th they stand round the bed in despair.  Don Garcia de Toledo, the prince’s faithful governor, is sitting by him, worn out with sleepless nights, and trying to supply to the poor boy that mother’s tenderness which he has never known.  Alva too is there, stern, self-compressed, most terrible, and yet most beautiful.  He has a God on earth, and that is Philip his master; and though he has borne much from Don Carlos already, and will have to bear more, yet the wretched lad is to him as a son of God, a second deity, who will by right divine succeed to the inheritance of the first; and he watches this lesser deity struggling between life and death with an intensity of which we, in these less loyal days, can form no notion.  One would be glad to have a glimpse of what passed through that mind, so subtle and so ruthless, so disciplined and so loyal withal:  but Alva was a man who was not given to speak his mind, but to act it.

One would wish, too, for a glimpse of what was passing through the mind of another man, who has been daily in that sick chamber, according to Olivarez’ statement, since the first of the month:  but he is one who has had, for some years past, even more reason than Alva for not speaking his mind.  What he looked like we know well, for Titian has painted him from the life—­a tall, bold, well-dressed man, with a noble brain, square and yet lofty, short curling locks and beard, an eye which looks as though it feared neither man nor fiend—­and it has had good reason to fear both—­and features which would be exceeding handsome, but for the defiant snub-nose.  That is Andreas Vesalius, of Brussels, dreaded and hated by the doctors of the old school—­suspect, moreover, it would seem, to inquisitors and theologians, possibly to Alva himself; for he has dared to dissect human bodies; he has insulted the medievalists at Paris, Padua, Bologna, Pisa, Venice, in open theatre; he has turned the heads of all the young surgeons in Italy and France; he has written a great book, with prints in it, designed, some say, by Titian—­they were actually done by another Netherlander, John of Calcar, near Cleves—­in which he has dared to prove that Galen’s anatomy was at fault throughout, and that he had been describing a monkey’s inside when he had pretended to be describing a man’s; and thus, by impudence and quackery, he has wormed himself—­this Netherlander, a heretic at heart, as all Netherlanders are, to God as well as to Galen—­into the confidence of the late Emperor Charles V., and gone campaigning with him as one of his physicians, anatomising human bodies even on the battle-field, and defacing the likeness of Deity; and worse than that, the most religious King Philip is deceived by him likewise, and keeps him in Madrid in wealth and honour; and now, in the prince’s extreme danger, the king has actually sent for him, and bidden him try his skill—­a man who knows nothing save about bones and muscles and the outside of the body, and is unworthy the name of a true physician.