courage of those who had been tortured, outraged, and exiled by his intolerance. The martial semicircle of the Moors enclosed his forces in a volume of destructive flame, and their disciplined valor and skilful manoeuvres completely annihilated them. The bodies of the vanquished that strewed the battlefield were, in general, too horribly disfigured with wounds to admit of their persons being identified; and Sebastian's corpse being among the number, his actual death became doubtful. This circumstance, twenty years afterwards furnished the papal machinery with a convenient opportunity for manufacturing a bogus Sebastian. But although Joseph Taxera, a Dominican monk, traversed Europe to enlist the imperial courts in its favor, yet the numerous spurious Sebastians that had sprung up, and the eagerness of several crowned heads to seize the kingdom, defeated the object of his mission. The controversy was finally settled by the battle of Alancatura, which, crowning with victory the arms of Philip II., of Spain, one of the claimants, subjugated Portugal to the dominion of Spain. The religious frenzy and whimsical ambition of Sebastian, the result of his Catholic education, cost Portugal the flower of her nobility, the strength of her army, and her national independence; overloaded her with debt, and degraded her under the dominion of a government distracted by unsuccessful wars, and governed by a rapacious and unprincipled administration. When John III., in 1540, introduced the Jesuists into his kingdom, the doom of Portugal was sealed. From that period, under the intolerant measures of his administration, its power began rapidly to decline, until its disastrous connection with Spain secured its downfall. Guinea, Brazil, the Molluccas, and all the fairest dominions of Portugal were wrung from her grasp. Spain oppressed her with rapacious tyranny; England and the Jesuists monopolized her trade, and the calamities which had visited her in such frightful succession exhausted her resources.