His present prosperity came as a brilliant glimpse through hopeless darkness, and so departed. Revisiting England in 1596, he found himself denied access to Essex, shunned by the Bacons, and disregarded by every body. The consequent mortification accelerated his return to France, which he reached, as Henry was concluding peace with Philip, to encounter cold distrust and speedy neglect from the French King. All this was the result of his own incurable double-dealing. He had been Henry's spy in the court of Elizabeth, and was, or fancied himself to be Elizabeth's at Paris. But the omnipotent secretary of state and the needy adventurer played the game of duplicity and perfidy with the odds reversed. All parties, as their experience unmasked his hollow insincerity, shrunk from reliance on, or intercourse with an ambidextrous knave, to whom mischief and deceit were infinitely more congenial than wisdom and honesty. "The truth is," wrote Villeroy, one of the French ministers, to a correspondent in 1605, "that his adversities have not made him much wiser or more discreet than he was in his prosperity." We must confess ourselves unable to perceive any traces of even the qualified improvement admitted by Villeroy. The rest of the biography of this extraordinary man is a miserable diary of indignant lamentations over his abject condition--of impudent laudations of the blameless integrity of his career--of grovelling and ineffectual efforts and supplications to appease and eradicate the hatred of Philip--and of vociferous cries for relief from penury and famine. "I am in extreme want, having exhausted the assistance of all my friends, and no longer knowing where to find my daily bread," is the terrible confession of the once favourite minister of the most powerful monarch in Europe. He never touched the ground, or even gazed on the distant hills of Spain again. In one of the obscure streets of Paris, in solitude and poverty, he dragged the grief and infirmities of his old age slowly towards the grave; and at length, in the seventy-second year of his age, on a natural and quiet deathbed, closed the troubles of his tempestuous existence. Such is "this strange eventful history." Such was the incalculable progeny of misery, disgrace, disaster, and ruin, involving himself, his family, countless individuals, and an entire nation, which issued from the guilty love of Perez and the Princess of Eboli. _Antonio Perez and Philip II._ By M. MIGNET. Translated by C. COCKS, B.L. London: 1846. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 4: "Dona Ana de Mendoza y de la Cerda," observes the historian of the house of Silva, "the only daughter of Don Diego de Mendoza and the Lady Catalina de Silva, was, from the blood which ran in her veins, from her beauty, and her noble inheritance, one of the most desirable matches (_apeticidos casamientos_) of the day!"] RECOLLECTIONS OF A LOVER OF SOCIETY. No. II. 1802.