cognised one of his vassals as a king, lost all real authority over the others.

If the whole of Germany and the Low Countries had remained one united body, if the former had not been laid waste by the thirty years' war, and the latter by the war which produced the independence of the United Provinces, such an empire would have been the arbiter of the Continent. Flanders, Alsace, Lorraine, and Franche Compté would have remained German; France would not have been able twice to threaten the independence of Europe; a Bourbon would not now be reigning in Spain.

No country would have gained so much by such a change in the course of events as Spain. In the first place, she would have become Protestant. Few of the phenomena of that remarkable period are more striking than the weakness of the hold which peculiar religious opinions then possessed over the bulk of the people of Europe. Henry VIII., Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth, turned the English backwards and forwards, from Romanism to Protestantism, and from Protestantism to Romanism, at the will, we had almost said at the caprice, of the monarch for the time being. The pride of the Roman Catholics had not been roused by the rivalry of a new Church, with bishops, and revenues, and patronage, and power, and rank of its own. The Reformation appeared to them not the introduction of a hostile faith, but a purification of the old one, and wherever it was not persecuted it was adopted.

Ireland may appear to be an exception; but the real sovereigns of the greater part of Ireland were then its native chieftains. Henry VIII. and his immediate successors were hostile pretenders. And it may be added, that the Reformation was not preached to the Celtic Irish. They could not read Latin, and no reformer wrote or preached in Irish.

But if Spain had been Protestant, she would have escaped the Inquisition-the brutalising instrument which more than any other means of misgovernment, more than despotism, or insecurity, or lawlessness, or oppression, has degraded the Spanish mind. She would have escaped the religious wars which wasted her strength for more than sixty years. She would not have been governed by Jesuits and bigots. She would not have been deprived, by the expulsion of the Moors, of the most industrious part of her population. Naples and Sicily, like Spain, would have adopted the faith of their master; and it is probable that Romanism, after lingering for a short time in a portion of France, of Italy, and of Poland, would have gradually died out,

and have been remembered, with magic, astrology, and alchemy, as one of the strange delusions of the dark unreasoning ages.

We cannot but be eager to know more of the men on whose conduct such vast consequences depended. To know how far that conduct was the result of the dispositions implanted in them by nature, and how far of the circumstances in which they were placed. How far it is to be imputed to their advisers, and how far to the solitary working of their own faculties and passions.

We have ample materials to form an estimate of Luther. The business of his life was to write and to talk, and his friends preserved his letters and his conversation with the care, we may say the veneration, which all that came from such a man deserved. In his correspondence and his tisch-reden, we have a fuller and a more detailed revelation of his innermost man than we possess of any other person, with the single exception of Dr. Johnson.

We see his strong conscientiousness, his religious fervour, his impulsive sense of duty, his unwearied diligence, his heroic courage never rushing into rashness; his vivid imagination, checked, though not sufficiently controlled, by his strong reason; and as the result of these passions and faculties, an aggressive force, a power of destruction, which no spiritual reformer, except perhaps Mahomet, ever directed against deeply rooted abuses. We see also a fearful amount of credulity, superstition, intolerance, and violence, to be imputed partly to the ignorance and rough energy of the 16th century, and partly to his severe and confined education, at first in privation, in want, and in beggary, and afterwards among the ascetic observances and dull degrading duties of a monastery.

We see, too, what perhaps was also the result of this education, his deep melancholy, his early and constantly increasing disgust at life, his regrets at not having died in infancy, his despair of improvement; indeed, his expectation that human affairs would go on from bad to worse till the last day, a day which he hoped and believed to be at hand, should close the reign of evil.

Before the publications, the titles of which are prefixed to this article, Charles V. was known to English readers chiefly in the judicious but somewhat pompous pages of Robertson. Robertson remarks that the circumstances transmitted to us with respect to his private deportment and character, are fewer and less interesting than might have been expected from the great number of the authors who have undertaken to write an account of his life. And the little that he himself has related of them is so full of error, that we need not regret that he has not given us more.

Within the last twenty years, however, a flood of light has been shed on the details of the great figure, of which, till then, we had seen only the outlines. The Correspondenz des Kaisers Carl V.,' by Dr. Carl, published in 1845-46, the Colecion de Documentos ineditos para la Historia de España,' and the Relazioni degli Ambasciatori Veneti,' both works still in course of publication, and the Papiers d'Etat du Cardinal de Granvelle,' have revealed so much that was unknown, and rectified so much that was mistaken, in his history as an emperor and a king, that it might almost be rewritten; and it now appears that his life, from the time of his abdication, on which little had been published, and that little turns out to have been often erroneous, had been recorded with as much minuteness, and far more fidelity, than even that of Napoleon.

The new sources of information are, A Narrative of the Residence of Charles V. in the Monastery of Yuste, written by one of the monks, and A Correspondence between Charles and his Family, and between his Confidential Attendants and the Spanish Court, embracing rather more than two years, beginning with his arrival in Spain after his abdication, and terminating some months after his death.

These records, however, have, as yet, been imperfectly communicated to the public.

The Narrative is now among the Archives of the Court of Appeal of Brussels. M. Bakhuisen Van der Brinc has published an abridgment of it, and M. Gachard promises to print the whole text in a second volume, still unpublished, of his Retraite et Mort de Charles-Quint.'

The Correspondence was buried in the Royal Archives of Simancas, which, as might have been expected from the puerile Government of Spain, were carefully kept excluded from foreign, and indeed from native eyes. In 1809, however, the Castle of Simancas was occupied by General Kellerman and his dragoons, acting in the name, and professing to be under the command, of King Joseph. They treated its contents as they usually treated everything that was Spanish. The documents which related to the history of France they sent to Paris, the rest they used as fuel; and when no more was wanted for that purpose, they cut open whole bundles for the sake of the string with which they were tied up. When the Duke of Wellington's surprise of Oporto and advance from Portugal occasioned their retreat, they set fire to the Castle and destroyed a large portion of it, with all that it contained. Ferdinand VII. employed Don Tomas Gonzalez to rearrange and classify the remnant that had not perished during General

Kellerman's occupation. While thus employed he discovered the correspondence relating to Charles V.'s residence at Yuste. The use to which he turned it was to make it the base of a work on the last two years of Charles's life, consisting of the letters which he thought deserving of publication, connected by a brief explanatory notice. At the time of his death in 1825 the work was transcribed for the press, but unprinted. Don Manuel Gonzalez, his brother, succeeded him in his office at Simancas, and inherited his papers. He was displaced and ruined by the revolution of 1836; and after some ineffectual efforts to get a higher price, sold the manuscript to the French Government in 1844. A mention of it in the Handbook of Spain' attracted Mr. Stirling's attention. With some difficulty he ascertained its fate, and with still more difficulty, with the united assistance of the President of the Republic, Lord Normanby, and M. Drouyn de L'huys, gained access to it. It is the foundation of what M. Mignet has well described as le 'charmant volume de M. Stirling,' and of that portion of the work of M. Pichot which is subsequent to Charles V.'s abdication.

But neither of these writers saw the original documents: they quoted the Narrative from Backhuisen, and the Correspondence from Gonzalez. M. Gachard, however, the Archiviste General of Belgium, found the guardians of the treasures of Simancas more complaisant than they had been to any previous traveller. He appears to have had an unlimited permission to have papers copied. He used it to obtain copies of the 237 letters which are contained in the first volume of his work. Of these letters, 201 were written by Quijada, the Emperor's chamberlain, or mayordomo.

Luis Mender Quijada, Lord of Villagarcia, had been thirtyfour years in the service of the Emperor at the time of his abdication.

'Unconsciously portrayed,' says Mr. Stirling, in his own graphic letters, the best of the Yuste correspondence, he stands forth the type of the cavalier, and "old rusty Christian,"* of Castille-spare and sinewy of frame, and somewhat formal and severe in the cut of his beard and the fashion of his manners; in character reserved and punctilious, but true as steel to the cause espoused or the duty undertaken; keen and clear in his insight into inen and things around him, yet devoutedly believing his master the greatest prince that ever had been or was to be; proud of himself, his family, and his services, and inclined, in a grave decorous way, to exaggerate

*Cristiano viejo rancioso,' Don Quixote, p. i. cap. xxvii., so translated by Shelton.

their importance; a true son of the Church, with an instinctive distrust of its ministers; a hater of Jews, Turks, heretics, friars, and Flemings; somewhat testy, somewhat obstinate, full of strong sense and strong prejudice; a warm-hearted, energetic, and honest man.' Fifty-seven of the letters were written by Martin Gaztelu, the Emperor's secretary.

He,' says Mr. Stirling, 'comes next to the mayordomo in order of precedence, and in the importance of his functions. His place was one of great trust. The whole correspondence of the Emperor passed through his hands. Even the most private and confidential communications addressed to the Princess-regent by her father, were generally written, at his dictation, by Gaztelu; for the imperial fingers were seldom sufficiently free from gout to be able to do more than add a brief postscript, in which Doña Juana was assured of the affection of her buen padre Carlos. The secretary had probably spent his life in the service of the Emperor; but I have been unable to learn more of his history than his letters have preserved. His epistolary style was clear, simple, and businesslike, but inferior to that of Quixada in humour, and in careless graphic touch, and more sparing in glimpses of the rural life of Estremadura three hundred years ago.'

Twenty-six letters from Dr. Cornelius Mathys, the Flemish physician who had the troublesome task of repairing the infirmities and controlling the appetite of his gouty edacious master, complete the gossiping correspondence which relates the domestic life of Charles V.

Nearly all the rest of the letters are political, and consist principally of a correspondence between Charles V. and his daughter, Doña Juana, acting as Vice Queen of Spain; JuanVasquez de Molina, her Secretary of State; Charles's sister, Mary, Queen Dowager of Hungary; and Philip II.

What the contents of M. Gachard's second volume will be we have not been informed, except that it will contain in full the narrative of the Monk of Yuste.

M. Pichot's work is, what he calls it, a chronicle. It is a collection of anecdotes, letters, conversations, and remarks relating to the domestic life of Charles V., both before and after his abdication, and to the persons who came most into contact with him. Its defect is that which most easily besets biographers-partiality to its hero. Some of the faults imputed to Charles V. M. Pichot extenuates; others he takes the bolder course of denying. When the evidence is doubtful, he explains it away; where it is positive, he discredits it. He disbelieves, for instance, much of the language ascribed to Charles V. by the Prior of Yuste, although the Prior's narrative was written