The prince on whom so much depended was the most miserable of human beings.  In old times he would have been exposed as soon as he came into the world; and to expose him would have been a kindness.  From his birth a blight was on his body and on his mind.  With difficulty his almost imperceptible spark of life had been screened and fanned into a dim and flickering flame.  His childhood, except when he could be rocked and sung into sickly sleep, was one long piteous wail.  Until he was ten years old his days were passed on the laps of women; and he has never once suffered to stand on his ricketty legs.  None of those tawny little urchins, clad in rags stolen from scarecrows, whom Murillo loved to paint begging or rolling in the sand, owed less to education than this despotic ruler of thirty millions of subjects, The most important events in the history of his own kingdom, the very names of provinces and cities which were among his most valuable possessions, were unknown to him.  It may well be doubted whether he was aware that Sicily was an island, that Christopher Columbus had discovered America, or that the English were not Mahometans.  In his youth, however, though too imbecile for study or for business, he was not incapable of being amused.  He shot, hawked and hunted.  He enjoyed with the delight of a true Spaniard two delightful spectacles, a horse with its bowels gored out, and a Jew writhing in the fire.  The time came when the mightiest of instincts ordinarily wakens from its repose.  It was hoped that the young King would not prove invincible to female attractions, and that he would leave a Prince of Asturias to succeed him.  A consort was found for him in the royal family of France; and her beauty and grace gave him a languid pleasure.  He liked to adorn her with jewels, to see her dance, and to tell her what sport he had had with his dogs and his falcons.  But it was soon whispered that she was a wife only in name.  She died; and her place was supplied by a German princess nearly allied to the Imperial House.  But the second marriage, like the first, proved barren; and, long before the King had passed the prime of life, all the politicians of Europe had begun to take it for granted in all their calculations that he would be the last descendant, in the male line, of Charles the Fifth.  Meanwhile a sullen and abject melancholy took possession of his soul.  The diversions which had been the serious employment of his youth became distasteful to him.  He ceased to find pleasure in his nets and boar spears, in the fandango and the bullfight.  Sometimes he shut himself up in an inner chamber from the eyes of his courtiers.  Sometimes he loitered alone, from sunrise to sunset, in the dreary and rugged wilderness which surrounds the Escurial.  The hours which he did not waste in listless indolence were divided between childish sports and childish devotions.  He delighted in rare animals, and still more in dwarfs.  When neither strange beasts nor little men could dispel