that dismal epoch, avenged more deeply, perhaps, than the jester thought, the previous misfortunes of France.  The Grand Turk, too, Solyman the Magnificent, possessed most of Hungary, and held at that moment a fleet ready to sail against Naples, in co-operation with the Pope and France.  Thus the Infidel, the Protestant, and the Holy Church were all combined together to crush him.  Towards all the great powers of the earth, he stood not in the attitude of a conqueror, but of a disappointed, baffled, defeated potentate.  Moreover, he had been foiled long before in his earnest attempts to secure the imperial throne for Philip.  Ferdinand and Maximilian had both stoutly resisted his arguments and his blandishments.  The father had represented the slender patrimony of their branch of the family, compared with the enormous heritage of Philip; who, being after all, but a man, and endowed with finite powers, might sink under so great a pressure of empire as his father wished to provide for him.  Maximilian, also, assured his uncle that he had as good an appetite for the crown as Philip, and could digest the dignity quite as easily.  The son, too, for whom the Emperor was thus solicitous, had already, before the abdication, repaid his affection with ingratitude.  He had turned out all his father’s old officials in Milan, and had refused to visit him at Brussels, till assured as to the amount of ceremonial respect which the new-made king was to receive at the hands of his father.

Had the Emperor continued to live and reign, he would have found himself likewise engaged in mortal combat with that great religious movement in the Netherlands, which he would not have been able many years longer to suppress, and which he left as a legacy of blood and fire to his successor.  Born in the same year with his century, Charles was a decrepit, exhausted man at fifty-five, while that glorious age, in which humanity was to burst forever the cerements in which it had so long been buried, was but awakening to a consciousness of its strength.

Disappointed in his schemes, broken in his fortunes, with income anticipated, estates mortgaged, all his affairs in confusion; failing in mental powers, and with a constitution hopelessly shattered; it was time for him to retire.  He showed his keenness in recognizing the fact that neither his power nor his glory would be increased, should he lag superfluous on the stage where mortification instead of applause was likely to be his portion.  His frame was indeed but a wreck.  Forty years of unexampled gluttony had done their work.  He was a victim to gout, asthma, dyspepsia, gravel.  He was crippled in the neck, arms, knees, and hands.  He was troubled with chronic cutaneous eruptions.  His appetite remained, while his stomach, unable longer to perform the task still imposed upon it, occasioned him constant suffering.  Physiologists, who know how important a part this organ plays in the affairs of life, will perhaps see