was but the phantom of that ancient municipal liberty which it had been the especial care of his father and his great-grandfather to destroy.  Most patiently did Philip, by his steady inactivity, bring about the decay of the last ruins of free institutions in the peninsula.  The councils and legislative assemblies were convoked and then wearied out in waiting for that royal assent to their propositions and transactions, which was deferred intentionally, year after year, and never given.  Thus the time of the deputies was consumed in accomplishing infinite nothing, until the moment arrived when the monarch, without any violent stroke of state, could feel safe in issuing decrees and pragmatic edicts; thus reducing the ancient legislative and consultative bodies to nullity, and substituting the will of an individual for a constitutional fabric.  To criticise the expenses of government or to attempt interference with the increase of taxation became a sorry farce.  The forms remained in certain provinces after the life had long since fled.  Only in Arragon had the ancient privileges seemed to defy the absolute authority of the monarch; and it was reserved for Antonio Perez to be the cause of their final extirpation.  The grinning skulls of the Chief Justice of that kingdom and of the boldest and noblest advocates and defenders of the national liberties, exposed for years in the market-place, with the record of their death-sentence attached, informed the Spaniards, in language which the most ignorant could read, that the crime of defending a remnant of human freedom and constitutional law was sure to draw down condign punishment.  It was the last time in that age that even the ghost of extinct liberty was destined to revisit the soil of Spain.  It mattered not that the immediate cause for pursuing Perez was his successful amour with the king’s Mistress, nor that the crime of which he was formally accused was the deadly offence of Calvinism, rather than his intrigue with the Eboli and his assassination of Escovedo; for it was in the natural and simple sequence of events that the last vestige of law or freedom should be obliterated wherever Philip could vindicate his sway.  It must be admitted, too, that the king seized this occasion to strike a decisive blow with a promptness very different from his usual artistic sluggishness.  Rarely has a more terrible epigram been spoken by man than the royal words which constituted the whole trial and sentence of the Chief Justice of Arragon, for the crime of defending the law of his country:  “You will take John of Lanuza, and you will have his head cut off.”  This was the end of the magistrate and of the constitution which he had defended.