To pass their lives in the castle Del Ovo, was therefore the last prospect that remained to Sebastian and to his blameless wife. When our fate appears inevitable, who is it that weakly continues to contend against it? Confiding their daughter’s future happiness to Heaven, and to the Duchess Medina Sidonia, they dried their tears, as they sometimes flowed, when thinking of their eternal separation, and taught themselves to rejoice in her liberty. Of the world they now thought only as of a scene on which they should never more appear: they banished its hopes, its fears, its anxieties, and submitting to the divine decree, made their world in each other’s hearts. Those qualities which had never failed to attract and to attach every one within their influence, still continued to win the affections of whatever persons approached them. Stephano and Baptista privately confessed to their friends, their admiration of the royal sufferers, and their firm belief of Sebastian’s just claim on liberty and dominion: these confidential discourses, spreading from confidant to confidant, at length diffused throughout Naples so lively an interest in the supposed impostor, that Sossa and others of Philip’s party became uneasy, and remonstrated against the indulgence of Count Lemos. While persisting in his generous line of conduct, the good Lemos was seized by a return of his disorder, and in a very few days reduced to the brink of the grave: his son, who was just arrived from the Spanish court, and who came hotly zealous for the punishment of him, whom Philip affected to consider a base-born Calabrian, was summoned to the deathbed of his aged parent. Count Lemos spoke of the prisoner: having listened patiently to the short but violent reply of his son, Lemos raised himself on his pillow, and addressing him with a solemn voice, said, “I am dying, my son! and the words of a dying man may be trusted.--As I hope for mercy and pardon at the judgment seat of Christ, I believe this man whom you call an impostor, to be the true and lawful Sebastian King of Portugal: as such I charge you (should my government devolve on you) treat him nobly; and let no worldly honours tempt you to touch his life, or to connive at the violence of others. Friends! you who surround and hear me at this awful moment, I charge you all to testify what I have said, and to bear with it, my dying request to my sovereign master Don Philip: I intreat him for his soul’s sake, to sift this matter more closely.” Exhausted by this exertion, Count Lemos stopt, and laid his head back upon the pillow:--shortly after he breathed his last, and nothing remained of the venerable old man, but a clay-cold corpse.