At the age of ninety he wrote his treatise in defence of the Peruvians, the last of his known compositions, and which was written, as is stated in its text, in 1564.(75) The style and arguments of this work are identical with those that characterised all his writings. The last negotiation in behalf of American interests that Las Casas undertook and saw to a successful finish, was to obtain the restoration of the Audiencia of the Confines, to Gracias á Dios, whence it had been recently transferred to Panama, thus leaving the whole of the former province with no superior tribunal for the administration of justice. This business called him from Valladolid to Madrid in the spring of 1566. The life of the great Bishop was nearing its end. He had long outlived all his early contemporaries, he had enjoyed the confidence and respect of three of the most remarkable sovereigns, Ferdinand of Aragon, Charles V. and Philip II., all of whom had received his fearless admonitions, not only with docility, but had responded with cordial admiration. Cardinal Ximenez, Pope Adrian VI., the powerful Flemish favourites, the discoverers and conquerors from Columbus to Cortes and Pizarro, were all long since dead, and he had seen numbers of his most powerful enemies in disgrace and in their graves. The Spain on which he closed his aged eyes was a different country from that on which he had first, opened them; the colonial development in America, the Reformation in Germany, the rise of England—all these and a hundred events of minor but far-reaching importance, had changed the face of the world. The illness which proved fatal to Las Casas overtook him in the convent of the Atocha in Madrid, and in the latter days of July, 1566, he died.(76) Only a few days before he breathed his last he wrote the following sentences, which were probably the last his prolific pen ever traced. They portray the character and aspirations of this great man more fully, perhaps, than any other of his multitudinous compositions.