population of individual cities. Within a century Burgos dropped from fifteen hundred inhabitants to six hundred and fifty.

Such was the dismembered and afflicted kingdom bequeathed by Philip the Great to his simple-witted heir. Poor Charles!-as amiable a character as the world has witnessed; whose only positive vice, beyond a neglect of his personal cleanliness, was a passion for harmless practical joking. The Exorciser's Manual has exposed to us a number of the Church's pet experiments for banishing a devil. Charles was possessed of many, demanding a more than common ingenuity on the part of the practitioners called in to operate on him; and when we remember the weary martyrdom endured with exemplary resignation by this drop-chinned, pale-faced, kingly energumen, we cannot but confess that, pathologically speaking, they had secured the very best of subjects. On probing the patient's intellect, it was discovered that on the 3rd of April, 1675-the very year of our Manual's imprimatur-a spell had been administered to him in the form of chocolate, mingled with parts of an executed malefactor: with the brains, to deprive him of his government; with the entrails, to deprive him of his health; and with the kidneys, to deprive him of the power of procreation. But in the words of the proverb, "para todo hay remedio, menos para la muerte."* So there was in this case. The knifelike tongues of Pedro de Matilla and Froilán Díaz, of Juan Rodríguez and Tomás de Rocaberti worked prodigies of ecclesiastical cure upon that ailing brain, as well

* "Everything can be remedied, except death."

CHARLES THE SECOND.

as the prescription of Alvarez de Argüelles. "He is sadly infected," said this latter. "It is a miracle that he is alive. Let him be given, before he break his fast, a half cuartillo of oil, with the benediction of exorcisms; let him take abundant exercise and a blessing be pronounced on all he eats and drinks." It is d'Harcourt who recalls another of the royal medicines—the stale of cows-" the gilded puddle that beasts would cough at "; nor should we forget the nurses gathered round that ghastly sick bed -Casilda and the nuns espirituadas of the good Argüelles, and María or Ana Díaz, "that lived in the Calle Mayor and was the mother of children."

Enough of these experiments in surgical and medical Christianity! It is impossible for the eye of the uninitiated to examine, as well as for his pen to write of them.

Poor Charles !-his was indeed "a hand to hold a sceptre up, and with the same to act controlling laws." Ironic fate appointed him the ruler of the proudest people in the world. "Yo nada soy," he exclaimed, as he signed his will,-"I am nothing." At most his intelligence allowed him now and again to realize how onerous was his father's legacy to him; how terribly he had misused it. For the worst of all had come to pass, and, criminally abandoned by both officers and crew, the great galleon of the Spains was finally going to pieces on the rocks of national misrule.

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CHAPTER XII.

THE PRESENT OF THE PRESENT. WANT OF JUSTICE AND WANT OF EDUCATION.

A justicia en España," observed a wellknown lawyer in my hearing, "es larga, cara, y mala.” * I am relieved to be able to report this aphorism as escaping from the lips of a Spaniard; for it exactly confirms my personal conviction. The judicial system obtaining in the Peninsula appears to have been designed with the express purpose of protecting the guilty and chastising the innocent. The Civil Code is not inordinately worse than that of other countries, although, by reason of its contradictoriness, and fatuous spirit of procrastination, it is bad enough. Lawsuits are invariably of the Jarndyce v. Jarndyce denomination; and the lawyer's client should solace himself with the refrán which says that “Más vale buena esperanza que ruin posesión "—"Great expectation is better than small fulfilment."† More

* "Justice in Spain is lengthy, costly, and bad."
† Nor is the following copla less admonitory—

Los pleitos y las sangrías
Lo mismo vienen á ser;
Evitalos cuanto puedas
Si no quieres padecer.
"Lawsuits and blood-lettings
Amount to the same thing:

Avoid them so far as you are able,

If you would avoid suffering."