Not long before his death, Charles II. of Spain had one of those strange funereal yearnings, so distinctive of the last days of nearly every member of the Austrian House of Spain. Thus, Juana la Loca would not surrender the embalmed body of her husband, and Philip II., shortly before he died, called for a skull and placed a crown upon it. Philip IV. went and lay in the niche destined for him in the Pantheon. And similarly, a weird sepulchral fancy animated the decaying brain of Charles II. To indulge his morbid and diseased feelings, he would descend into the royal mausoleum, open the coffins, and look face to face on the chiefs of his race who had worn his crown before him. He went down by the light of torches into the dark vault of the Pantheon, the huge _candelabrum_ was lit, and all the coffins, beginning with that of Charles V., were opened for him in order. Charles V. was much decayed; the features of Philip II. were distorted; Philip III. was nearly perfectly preserved in form, but crumbled into dust as soon as his body was touched. After the kings he passed to the queens, and when that of his first queen was opened, and he saw the form and still charming features of her who had glorified his dark life and brain for a while, his throat was convulsed, tears streamed from his eyes, and he fell with outstretched arms on the bier, crying, “My queen, my queen, before a year is past I will come and join you.”[8] This visit of the last descendant of the House of Austria to view the corpses of his race is one of the strangest scenes in history. Charles V. had his funeral rites celebrated before him, but, as Dr. Doran writes, the spectacle of the ex-Emperor celebrating his own funeral service has been divested of much of its apparent absurdity by the simple statements of eye-witnesses and modern writers who have reproduced their statements. It was a ceremony, however, on which even Charles did not venture till he had received ecclesiastical permission. He did not attend it in his shroud, nor lie down in his own coffin. There were the ordinary ornaments which the Romish Church uses at the usual services for the dead, and nothing more. The only exception to the ordinary service was when Charles, extinguishing the light which he held, surrendered it into the hands of a priest, in token of yielding up his life to the will of God. And similarly, we are reminded how Maria Theresa, who survived her husband fifteen years, lived amid the emblems of perpetual mourning. She shut herself up on the 18th of every month, and the whole of every August, the day and month of his death. As her life drew near its end, she spent many days at times in the funeral chapel before the picture of her husband, taken as he lay in his coffin, and her last words, well understood by those around her, were, “I come to thee.”