was a devil within him, that there were devils all around him.  He was exorcised according to the forms of his Church; but this ceremony, instead of quieting him, scared him out of almost all the little reason that nature had given him.  In his misery and despair he was induced to resort to irregular modes of relief.  His confessor brought to court impostors who pretended that they could interrogate the powers of darkness.  The Devil was called up, sworn and examined.  This strange deponent made oath, as in the presence of God, that His Catholic Majesty was under a spell, which had been laid on him many years before, for the purpose of preventing the continuation of the royal line.  A drug had been compounded out of the brains and kidneys of a human corpse, and had been administered in a cup of chocolate.  This potion had dried up all the sources of life; and the best remedy to which the patient could now resort would be to swallow a bowl of consecrated oil every morning before breakfast.  Unhappily, the authors of this story fell into contradictions which they could excuse only by throwing the blame on Satan, who, they said, was an unwilling witness, and a liar from the beginning.  In the midst of their conjuring, the Inquisition came down upon them.  It must be admitted that, if the Holy Office had reserved all its terrors for such cases, it would not now have been remembered as the most hateful judicature that was ever known among civilised men.  The subaltern impostors were thrown into dungeons.  But the chief criminal continued to be master of the King and of the kingdom.  Meanwhile, in the distempered mind of Charles one mania succeeded another.  A longing to pry into those mysteries of the grave from which human beings avert their thoughts had long been hereditary in his house.  Juana, from whom the mental constitution of her posterity seems to have derived a morbid taint, had sate, year after year, by the bed on which lay the ghastly remains of her husband, apparelled in the rich embroidery and jewels which he had been wont to wear while living.  Her son Charles found an eccentric pleasure in celebrating his own obsequies, in putting on his shroud, placing himself in the coffin, covering himself with the pall; and lying as one dead till the requiem had been sung, and the mourners had departed leaving him alone in the tomb.  Philip the Second found a similar pleasure in gazing on the huge chest of bronze in which his remains were to be laid, and especially on the skull which, encircled with the crown of Spain, grinned at him from the cover.  Philip the Fourth, too, hankered after burials and burial places, gratified his curiosity by gazing on the remains of his great grandfather, the Emperor, and sometimes stretched himself out at full length like a corpse in the niche which he had selected for himself in the royal cemetery.  To that cemetery his son was now attracted by a strange fascination.  Europe could show no more magnificent place of sepulture.