As to Philip’s really having delivered his son, Don Carlos, into the hands of the Grand Inquisitor as tragically told in Schiller’s “Don Carlos”, well that is drama, not history. But when a noted name and its suggested personality--for good or for evil and unfortunately less frequently for good than for evil--are once fascinatingly fixed in drama or story or song, not all the tomes of contradictory evidence, not all the living archives of dead centuries, not Truth itself, can shatter the crystal charm or make it cease shining. Alexander the Great, world conqueror; Socrates, the Wise; Plato, poet-philosopher; Aristotle, master of them that know; Julius Cæsar, deplored of all nations; Mark Anthony, Cleopatra’s lover; Nero, monster; Caligula-Commodus-Heliogabalus, crowned madmen; Marcus Aurelius, Emperor-philosopher; Charlemagne, the Good; Louis IX., the Saint; Louis XI., hypocrite; John of England, child murderer; Richard III., deformed devil; Henry VIII., wife-killer; Machiavelli, serpent-sophist; Louis XIV., despot, _Arbiter Elegantiarum_; Elizabeth, Good Queen Bess; Mary, Queen of Scots, the lovely unfortunate; Philip II. of Spain, bigot: thus are they fixed in the charmed circle of literature and thus shall they glitter forever. Is history itself any more reliable than drama? As to facts, Yes; as to motives, intentions, cumulative causes, results, all round truth, No. “Histories are as perfect as the historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul,” says the astute Carlyle; and every honest author feels at deepest heart the truth of these words. The soft art of omission is known to every artist of the pen. And condemnation euphemistically balanced by excusing comment may, in one artistic sentence, satisfy at once a writer’s conscience, his subjectivity, and the claims of his peculiar environment. Can any one doubt that it was thus Macaulay wrote his brilliant history of England? And even granted almost the impossible--that an historian be ruggedly truthful and fearlessly sincere; he is not thereby rendered wise, nor is he necessarily gifted with an eye and a soul. So in colors of sharp contrast upon the historic page will Philip II. ever be portrayed; but both can’t be right. Perhaps tho’ they may be as sundered extremes of a prismatic ray which, when complementary coloring shall have been added, will become white light. STORMS. Truly it was against storms and rocks as well as against such rough sea-dogs as Drake and Hawkins and Raleigh and Frobisher and Howard that the Invincible Armada contended. In the beginning of the northward cruise as the Armada was rounding the corner of Spain, off Corunna, a violent tempest arose. The frail caravels, and galleons and galleasses of 1588 were not so independent of wave and wind as are the Dreadnoughts of 1914. Yet ocean is still master of man; and man’s most titan-like Titanic is but a puny plaything in old Neptune’s hand.