make the declarations they wanted; but he only repeated: _Brother, you are killing me! Senor Juan Gomez, by our Saviour's wounds, let them finish me with one blow!... Let them leave me, I will say whatever they will; for God's sake, brother, have compassion on me!_ At the same time, he entreated them to relieve him from the position in which he was placed, and to give him his clothes, saying, he would speak. This did not happen until he had suffered eight turns of the rope; and the executioner being then ordered to leave the room where they had used the torture, Perez remained alone with the licentiate Juan Gomez and the scrivener Antonio Marquez." The impunity of tyranny was over-strained. The tide of sympathy fluctuated, and ebbed with murmuring agitation from the channel in which it had flowed so long with a steady current. Jesters and preachers uttered homely truths--the nobles trembled--and the people shuddered. With a few intelligible exceptions, there was a burst of general satisfaction when, on the 20th April 1591, two months after his torture, Perez, by the aid of his intrepid and devoted wife--(and shall we be too credulous in adding, with the connivance of his guards?)--broke his bonds, fled from Castile, and set his foot on the soil of independent Aragon. Let us now, for a moment, reconsider the motives which solve, as they guided, at once the indefensible guilt of Perez, and the malignant perfidy of Philip. The King of Spain unquestionably ordered the murder of Escovedo, and confided its perpetration to the docile secretary. But the death-warrant slumbered for a while in the keeping of the executioner. It was not until Escovedo acquired his perilous knowledge of the debaucheries of Perez and the Princess of Eboli, and had avowed his still more perilous resolution of publishing their frailty in a quarter where detection was ruin, that Perez plied with inflexible diligence artifice and violence, poison and dagger--to satisfy, coincidently, himself and his sovereign. By a similar infusion of emotions, roused by later occurrences, the feelings of Philip towards Perez underwent, after the murder, a radical change. He at first unhesitatingly joined, as we have seen, in rewarding the actual murderers. The tale of the preference lavished by beauty on his minion had not seared his heart-strings. With that revelation came the mood of inexpiable hate. A word from him, uttered with unequivocal emphasis, would have cleared and rescued Perez. Such words, indeed, he pronounced more than once; but never as he would have done, if their effect had been to screen merely the faithful minister of state. The object in their occasional recurrence was one of profound dissimulation. Philip's design was to lull the alarm of Perez, and to recover out of his hands every scrap of written evidence which existed, implicating himself in the death of Escovedo. And it was under an erroneous impression of his