cloister as eagerly as Charles had sought it.  He panted for the tempests of the great external world as earnestly as the conqueror who had so long ridden upon the whirlwind of human affairs sighed for a haven of repose.  None of his predecessors had been more despotic, more belligerent, more disposed to elevate and strengthen the temporal power of Rome.  In the inquisition he saw the grand machine by which this purpose could be accomplished, and yet found himself for a period the antagonist of Philip.  The single circumstance would have been sufficient, had other proofs been wanting, to make manifest that the part which he had chosen to play was above his genius.  Had his capacity been at all commensurate with his ambition, he might have deeply influenced the fate of the world; but fortunately no wizard’s charm came to the aid of Paul Caraffa, and the triple-crowned monk sat upon the pontifical throne, a fierce, peevish, querulous, and quarrelsome dotard; the prey and the tool of his vigorous enemies and his intriguing relations.  His hatred of Spain and Spaniards was unbounded.  He raved at them as “heretics, schismatics, accursed of God, the spawn of Jews and Moors, the very dregs of the earth.”  To play upon such insane passions was not difficult, and a skilful artist stood ever ready to strike the chords thus vibrating with age and fury.  The master spirit and principal mischief-maker of the papal court was the well-known Cardinal Caraffa, once a wild and dissolute soldier, nephew to the Pope.  He inflamed the anger of the pontiff by his representations, that the rival house of Colonna, sustained by the Duke of Alva, now viceroy of Naples, and by the whole Spanish power, thus relieved from the fear of French hostilities, would be free to wreak its vengeance upon their family.  It was determined that the court of France should be held by the secret league.  Moreover, the Pope had been expressly included in the treaty of Vaucelles, although the troops of Spain had already assumed a hostile attitude in the south of Italy.  The Cardinal was for immediately proceeding to Paris, there to excite the sympathy of the French monarch for the situation of himself and his uncle.  An immediate rupture between France and Spain, a re-kindling of the war flames from one end of Europe to the other, were necessary to save the credit and the interests of the Caraffas.  Cardinal de Tournon, not desirous of so sudden a termination to the pacific relations between his, country and Spain, succeeded in detaining him a little longer in Rome.—­He remained, but not in idleness.  The restless intriguer had already formed close relations with the most important personage in France, Diana of Poitiers.—­This venerable courtesan, to the enjoyment of whose charms Henry had succeeded, with the other regal possessions, on the death of his father, was won by the flatteries of the wily Caraffa, and by the assiduities of the Guise family.  The best and most sagacious statesmen,