1556, he set sail from Zeland for Spain.  These delays and difficulties occasioned some misconceptions.  Many persons who did not admire an abdication, which others, on the contrary, esteemed as an act of unexampled magnanimity, stoutly denied that it was the intention of Charles to renounce the Empire.  The Venetian envoy informed his government that Ferdinand was only to be lieutenant for Charles, under strict limitations, and that the Emperor was to resume the government so soon as his health would allow.  The Bishop of Arras and Don Juan de Manrique had both assured him, he said, that Charles would not, on any account, definitely abdicate.  Manrique even asserted that it was a mere farce to believe in any such intention.  The Emperor ought to remain to protect his son, by the resources of the Empire, against France, the Turks, and the heretics.  His very shadow was terrible to the Lutherans, and his form might be expected to rise again in stern reality from its temporary grave.  Time has shown the falsity of all these imaginings, but views thus maintained by those in the best condition to know the truth, prove how difficult it was for men to believe in a transaction which was then so extraordinary, and how little consonant it was in their eyes with true propriety.  It was necessary to ascend to the times of Diocletian, to find an example of a similar abdication of empire, on so deliberate and extensive a scale, and the great English historian of the Roman Empire has compared the two acts with each other.  But there seems a vast difference between the cases.  Both emperors were distinguished soldiers; both were merciless persecutors of defenceless Christians; both exchanged unbounded empire for absolute seclusion.  But Diocletian was born in the lowest abyss of human degradation—­the slave and the son of a slave.  For such a man, after having reached the highest pinnacle of human greatness, voluntarily to descend from power, seems an act of far greater magnanimity than the retreat of Charles.  Born in the purple, having exercised unlimited authority from his boyhood, and having worn from his cradle so many crowns and coronets, the German Emperor might well be supposed to have learned to estimate them at their proper value.  Contemporary minds were busy, however, to discover the hidden motives which could have influenced him, and the world, even yet, has hardly ceased to wonder.  Yet it would have been more wonderful, considering the Emperor’s character, had he remained.  The end had not crowned the work; it not unreasonably discrowned the workman.  The earlier, and indeed the greater part of his career had been one unbroken procession of triumphs.  The cherished dream of his grandfather, and of his own youth, to add the Pope’s triple crown to the rest of the hereditary possessions of his family, he had indeed been obliged to resign.  He had too much practical Flemish sense to indulge long in chimeras, but he had achieved the Empire over formidable