Charles sought great enterprises, Philip would avoid them.  The Emperor never recoiled before threats; the son was reserved, cautious, suspicious of all men, and capable of sacrificing a realm from hesitation and timidity.  The father had a genius for action, the son a predilection for repose.  Charles took “all men’s opinions, but reserved his judgment,” and acted on it, when matured, with irresistible energy; Philip was led by others, was vacillating in forming decisions, and irresolute in executing them when formed.

Philip, then, was not considered, in that warlike age, as likely to shine as a warrior.  His mental capacity, in general, was likewise not very highly esteemed.  His talents were, in truth, very much below mediocrity.  His mind was incredibly small.  A petty passion for contemptible details characterized him from his youth, and, as long as he lived, he could neither learn to generalize, nor understand that one man, however diligent, could not be minutely acquainted with all the public and private affairs of fifty millions of other men.  He was a glutton of work.  He was born to write despatches, and to scrawl comments upon those which he received.

[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as this, and was hard at work eight or nine hours a day for forty years, would leave a prodigious quantity of unpublished matter at his death.]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,