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

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

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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.