The Press. — London, England, 1856-12-06 00:00:00

DECEMBER 6, 1856. Yitcraturt. History of the Reign of Charles the Fifth By William Robertson, D.D. With an Account of the Emperor's Life after his Abdication, by William H. Prescott. Two Vols. London : Routledge. A CRITICAL edition of Robertson's works, with fresh notes taking cognisance of the literary treasures which have been disclosed since the Scotch historian lived, would be a valuable gift to the general mass of readers. We believe that in " Murray's British Classics" it is contem plated to include the works of Robertson ; and with all his defects as an historian Robertson is entitled to much posthumous applause. It is a mistake, indeed, to allude to him as " the corn "peer of Hume and Gibbon." He had neither " the careless inimitable strokes " of the first, nor the wonderful research of the last. His temper as an historian is too frigid ; and the disposition of Robertson to palliate the enormities of the Spaniards in their conquest of America, is a great reproach to his fame. It was said also that the historian felt himself under so much obligation to the Spanish Court for having facilitated his re searches that he disliked making accusations against it ; bit such a plea could not be ac cepted as an excuse. Yet, in general, the philosophic calmness and moral temper of Robertson is highly commendable. He related facts with smoothness and sustained spirit, find he possessed the unbroken flow of nar rative which marks historical power. He had no subtle philosophical acumen ; his thinking is of au obvious character ; his style is often too thin, for he did not manage his notes well, having left matter in them which might have been used in the text. There is a decided decline in the estimation once acceded to him. But his merits are great and various, and he will always attract many readers. The present edition of " The age of Charles the Fifth" is cheaply and neatly printed. It has good type and paper, but it should have a preliminary table of contents. Its chief lite rary feature is the addition of four " books," as they are called, but which ought to be more properly designated as " chapters." Mr. Pres cott relates in them the chief points of the interesting matter which has been discovered in recent times about the life in retirement of Charles V. The style of those chapters runs in the usual vein of Mr. Prescott's composi tion. It wants point and closeness, but it has narrative effect. Their contents are borrowed freely from the labours of Mr. Stirling and M Mignet. Many of our readers must be familiar with Mr. Stirling's account of " The Cloister Life of the Emperor Charles the Fifth." But to some of them the following account of the historical discoveries about the Emperor may be interesting : Mr. Stirling, during a visit to the Peninsula, in 18.19, made a pilgrimage to Yuste; and the traditions arid hoary reminiscences gathered round the spot left such an impression on the :reveller's mind, that, on his return to England, he made them the subject of two elaborate papers in Fraser's Magazine, in the numbers for April and May, 1851. Although these spirited essays rested wholly on printed works, which had long been accessible to the scholar, they were found to contain many new and highly interesting details, showing how superficially Mr. Stir• ling's predecessors had examined the records of the Du• peror's resijence at Yuste. Still, in his account the author had omitted the most important feature of Charles's monastic life—the influence which he exercised on the ad ministration of the kingdom. This was to be gathered from the manuscripts of Simancas. Mr. Stirling, who, through that inexhaustible repository, the " Handbook of Spain," had become acquainted with the existence of the Gonzalez MS., was, at the time of writing his essays, ignorant of its fate. On learning, afterwards, where it was to be found, he visited Paris, and, having ob tained access to the volume, so far profited by its contents as to make them the basis of a separate work, which he entitled " The Cloister Life of Charles V." It soon attracted the attention of scholars, both at home and abroad, went through several editions, and was received, in short, with an avidity which showed both the importance attached to the developments the author had made, and the attractive form in which he had presented them to the reader. The Parisian scholars were now stimulated to turn to account the treasure which had remained so long neglected on their shelves. In 1ti.54, less than two years after the appearance of Mr. Stirling's book, M. Amedee Pichot pub lished his `. l Chroniqua de Ckarles-Quint," $ work which, THE PRESS. far from being confined to the latter days of the Emperor, covers the whole range of his biography, presenting a large amount of information in regard to his personal habits, as well as to the interior organisation of his government, and the policy which directed it. The whole is enriched, moreover, by a multitude of historical incidents, that may be regarded rather as subsidiary than essential to the conduct of the narrative, which is enlivened by much ingenious criticism on the state of manners, arts, and mural culture of the period. It was not long after the appearance of this work that M. Gachard, whom I have elsewhere noticed as having been commissioned by the Belgian Government to make extensive researches in the archives of Simancas, gave to the public some of the fruits of his labours, in the first volume of his " Retraitc et Mort de Charles• Quint." It is devoted to the letters of the Emperor and his house hold, which form the staple of the Gonzales MS.; thus placing at the disposition of the future biographer of Charles the original materials with which to reconstruct the history of his latter days. Lastly came the work, long expected, of M. Mignet, " Charles• Quint ; son Abdication, son Sejour, et sa Mort au Monastere de Yuste." It was the reproduction, in a more extended and elaborate form, of a aeries of papers, the first of which appeared shortly after the publication of Mr. Stirling's book. In this work, the French author takes the clear and comprehenAve view of his subject so characteristic of his genius. The difficult and debateable points he discusses with acuteness and precision; and the whole story of Charles's monastic life he presents in so luminous an aspect to the reader, as leaves nothing further to be desired. The minuteness of the Boswellian details of this cloister life of the Emperor• is extremely curious. About a hundred and fifty pages of this work are devoted to its representation, and Mr. Prescott has made a graceful epitome of the matter turned up by contemporary writers. Many traits in this picture are humiliating to human nature. The gluttony of the cloistered Emperor was absolutely disgusting. It is related here:— It was not altogether in the refined and intellectual pleasures of reading and social intercourse that Charles passed the time of his confinement. He had brought with him into retirement the same relish for the pleasures of the table which he had indulged through life. His appetite was excessive, rivalling that of Louis XIV., or Frederick the Great, or any other royal gourmand whose feats are recorded in history. The pertinacity with which he gratified it under all circumstances amounts to a trait F char , in the latter of ch,tacter. A Venetian envoy at bis Court, in tnt part of Charles's reign, tells us that, before rising in the morning, potted capon was usually served to him, prepared with sugar, milk, and spices ; after which he would turn to sleep again. At noon he dined on a variety of dishes. Soon after vespers he took another meal, and later in the evening supped heartily on anchovies. or some other gross and savory food, of which he was particularly fond. The invention of his cooks was sorely puzzled how to devise rich and high seasoned dishes to suit his palate ; and his maitre d'hotel, much perplexed, told his discontented master one day, knowing his passion for time-pieces, that he really did not know what he could do, unless it were to serve up his Majesty a fricassee of watches." The reply had the effect of provoking a hearty laugh from the Em peror—a circumstance of rare occurrence in the latter days of his reign. And further we are told : To wash down this extraordinary quantity of food, Charles drank in proportion. Iced beer was a favorite beverage with him, administered often the first thing on rising in the morning. When stronger potations were re quired, he had no objection to Rhenish wine. Roger Ascham, when in Germany, saw the Emperor on St. Andrew's-day, sitting at dinner at the feast of the Golden Fleece. He drank the best," says Ascham, " that I ever saw. He had his head in the glass five times as long as any of us, and never drank less than a good quart at once of Rhenish." It was in vain that his physician remon atrated, and that his confessor, Cardinal Loaysa, with an independence which did him credit, admonished him to desist from the pernicious practice of eating and drinking to excess, reminding him that his Creator had not sent him into the world to indulge in sensual delights, but by his diligent labours to save the Christian commonwealth. Charles gave ns little heed to the warnings of the divine as to those of the doctor. Unfortunately, his position en abled him too easily to obtain a dispensation from those fasts of the Church which might otherwise have stood him in good stead. In the end came the usual heavy reckon ing for such indulgence. He was tormented with in. digestion, bile, gout, and various other maladies that flesh —especially when high•fed and over-fed—is heir to. The gout was the most formidable of his foes. Its attacks were incessant. The man who had followed the chase without fatigue among the roughest passes of the Alpujarras, who hail kept the saddle day and night in his campaigns, and had been esteemed one of the best jousters in Europe, was obliged at length, whenever he travelled, to be borne in a litter, like a poor cripple. Care and excessive toil had combined with his intemperate way of life to break down a constitution naturally robust ; and, before he had reached the age of fißy, Charles was already an old man. The Emperor had much of the credulity con•; mon in his time. After describing the jewels which he still kept, it is said : Among these were several collars and badges of the Golden Fleece, the proud Burgundian Order of which the Spanish sovereign was now he head. But most of these jewelled coffers wen filled with relics or amulets. Among 1167 the former was a bit of the true cross. It afterwards passed as a precious legacy to I'hilip; as did also the con tents of another casket, a crucifix which his mother, the Empress Isabella, had in her hands in the hour of death, and which was afterwards to solace the last moments of her husband and her son. The other boxes were chiefly devoted to talismans, which the superstition of the times bad invested witl► marvellous properties for warding off disease. There were stones set in gold, sure styptics for stopping blood; nine English rings, a specific against cramp; a blue stone, richly chased, for expelling the gout ; four bezoar stones, in gold settings, of singular effi cacy in curing the plague; and other charms of the same kind. It may surprise one that a person of so strong a mind as Charles V. should have yielded so far to the popular superstition as to put faith in such trumpery. That he did so is evident from the care with which he pre served these amulets, and from his sending one of them— e bezoar stone—to his chamberlain, Van Male, when sup posed to be ill of the plague. Yet this should not be set down so much to superstition as to the credulity which grew out of an ignorance of the real properties of matter—an ignorance which the Emperor shared with the best instructed men of the age, who, in whatever re lated to physical science, were constantly betrayed into errors of which a schoolboy at the present day would be ashamed. And much more of similar interesting matter is neatly put together by Mr. Prescott, but as his matter avowedly is not original we would not be justified in longer extracts. We should have preferred that the authorities for this portion of these volumes had been cited par ticularly at the bottom of the pages. Taken as this edition now stands, the whole work presents a curious literary aspect. First we have the well-known preliminary disserta tion of Robertson on the "Progress of Society in Europe ;" next we have the " Reign of Charles the Fifth ;" and, lastly, we have ➢ir. Prescott's biography of his cloisters. So that the work is of threefold character, philoso phy, history, and personal portraiture. In the two first volumes of Mr. Macaulay's history, the artistic effect of the whole was rather marred by the long introduction on the history of England. Then came the minute descrip tion of Charles the Second's bedchamber and soon after was the " fourth chapter," written in a style of literary mosaic. The same variety of styles is visible in this edition of Robertson. The effect is less of artistic unity, but more of various interest. We recommend this edition for its cheap ness, and for its supplement by Mr. Prescott. But it requires a map of Europe, and a table of contents. The final index is good, but such a work should never be issued without a map. Life in Ancient India. By Mrs. Speir. London : Smith and Elder. THE distinguished writer of the political article in the last number of the Quarterly Review mentioned " the great Indian ques "tion" as one of those subjects which de manded the earnest attention of our people and Legislature. Why the Indian question is " great," and why it pressingly calls for settle ment, might well receive more elaborate illus tration than we can hope to afford it here. Some obvious considerations may, however, be briefly set forth. In the first place, the position of India is at this day unparalleled, not only as regards the dependencies of the British Crown, but as re gards the whole world. There is no State holding subject to it a country at all resem bling in extent of territory, in natural wealth and fertility, and in populousness, the magni ficent peninsula now included under the name of British India. Of its physical character Mrs. Speir has given a correct and picturesque description in her highly intelligent volume. To the west, British India is bounded by the Indus,—the most westward of the five rivers of the Punjaub marking the present limit to which British conquest has extended. To the north, the splendid range of the Himalayas, whose wonders and beauties have yet been but partially explored by European enterprise, form a magnificent natural boundary. To the east, the Brahmapatra river is taken by Mrs. Speir as our frontier, though some Bengal dis tricts stretch beyond it. We have already pene trated to Pegu, and at no distant date perhaps our boundary to the east may touch directly the Chinese empire, being separated only by the river Thaleain. To the south British India, is a peninsula, jutting into the ocean, with the noble island of Ceylon attached to IN by Us, th