[The character of these apostilles, always confused, wordy and awkward, was sometimes very ludicrous; nor did it improve after his thirty or forty years’ daily practice in making them.  Thus, when he received a letter from France in 1589, narrating the assassination of Henry III., and stating that “the manner in which he had been killed was that a Jacobin monk had given him a pistol-shot in the head” (la facon qua l’on dit qu’il a ette tue, sa ette par un Jacobin qui luy a donna d’un cou de pistolle dans la tayte), he scrawled the following luminous comment upon the margin.  Underlining the word “pistolle,” he observed, “this is perhaps some kind of knife; and as for ‘tayte,’ it can be nothing else but head, which is not tayte, but tete, or teyte, as you very well know” (quiza de alguna manera de cuchillo, etc., etc.)—­Gachard.  Rapport a M. le Minist. de l’Interieur, prefixed to corresp.  Philippe II.  Vol.  I. xlix. note 1.  It is obvious that a person who made such wonderful commentaries as this, and was hard at work eight or nine hours a day for forty years, would leave a prodigious quantity of unpublished matter at his death.]

He often remained at the council-board four or five hours at a time, and he lived in his cabinet.  He gave audiences to ambassadors and deputies very willingly, listening attentively to all that was said to him, and answering in monosyllables.  He spoke no tongue but Spanish; and was sufficiently sparing of that, but he was indefatigable with his pen.  He hated to converse, but he could write a letter eighteen pages long, when his correspondent was in the next room, and when the subject was, perhaps, one which a man of talent could have settled with six words of his tongue.  The world, in his opinion, was to move upon protocols and apostilles.  Events had no right to be born throughout his dominions, without a preparatory course of his obstetrical pedantry.  He could never learn that the earth would not rest on its axis, while he wrote a programme of the way it was to turn.  He was slow in deciding, slower in communicating his decisions.  He was prolix with his pen, not from affluence, but from paucity of ideas.  He took refuge in a cloud of words, sometimes to conceal his meaning, oftener to conceal the absence of any meaning, thus mystifying not only others but himself.  To one great purpose, formed early, he adhered inflexibly.  This, however, was rather an instinct than an opinion; born with him, not created by him.  The idea seemed to express itself through him, and to master him, rather than to form one of a stock of sentiments which a free agent might be expected to possess.  Although at certain times, even this master-feeling could yield to the pressure of a predominant self-interest-thus showing that even in Philip bigotry was not absolute—­yet he appeared on the whole the embodiment of Spanish chivalry and Spanish religious enthusiasm, in its late and corrupted form.  He was entirely a Spaniard.