inured to war, and accustomed to victory under heroic captains, upheld the wide renown of the Spanish infantry. But neither the abilities nor the auspicious fortunes of Charles were inherited with this vast dominion by Philip. It is almost a mystery the crumbling away during his reign of such wealth and such strength. To read the riddle, we must know Philip. The biography which we shall now hurriedly sketch, of one of his most eminent favourites and ministers, who was, also, one of the most remarkable men that ever lived, enables us to see further into the breast of the gloomy, jealous, and cruel king, than we could hope to do by the less penetrating light of general history. It was in the course of the year 1594, that the mother of the great Lord Bacon wrote bitterly to his brother Anthony--"Tho' I pity your brother, yet so long as he pities not himself, but keepeth that bloody PEREZ, yea, as a coach-companion and bed-companion, a proud, profane, costly fellow, whose being about him I verily fear the Lord God doth mislike, and doth less bless your brother in credit, and otherwise in his health, surely I am utterly discouraged, and make conscience further to undo myself to maintain such wretches as he is, that never loved your brother but for his own credit, living upon him." This dark portrait, even from the pencil of maternal anxiety, is not overcharged with shade. A few words, which could not have been uttered by the Lady Bacon except as a prophetess, we may add in reference to the meeting of the famous Englishman and the notorious Spaniard. At that moment the public life of Francis Bacon was faintly dawning. The future Minister of State and Chancellor of England had just entered the House of Commons, and was whining for promotion at the gate of the royal favourite. The mean subservience of his nature was to be afterwards developed in its repulsive fulness. His scheming ambition saw itself far away from the ermine of justice, doomed to be spotted by his corruption. He had not then betrayed, and brought to the scaffold, and slandered his benefactor. The power and honours of which he was to be stripped, were yet to be won. His glory and his shame alike were latent. He was beginning hazardously a career of brilliant and dismal vicissitudes, to finish it with a halo of immortal glory blazing round his name. But such a career along a strange parallelism of circumstances, although with a gloomier conclusion, Antonio Perez had already run. The unscrupulous confidant and reckless tool of a crafty and vindictive tyrant, he had wielded vast personal authority, and guided the movements of an immense empire.