Alfonso, in the transport of passion, retired, but soon returned, and said: “I perceive the truth of your remarks. He who will not execute the duties of a king cannot long have good subjects. Remember, from this day forward I am no longer Alfonso the Sportsman, but Alfonso, King of Portugal”--a resolve which he kept with the most rigid determination, becoming one of the greatest of the Portuguese monarchs. The only accomplishment, it is said, in which Alfonso VI. was a proficient was horsemanship. He once rode full-tilt at a savage bull in a meadow, but the brute so galled his royal assailant with his horns, that “he was unhorsed and nearly lost his life.” Amongst the wild acts of this wretched monarch, we are told how one night, returning from the chase, he charged two inoffensive citizens, sword in hand, and after riding over them would have despatched them, had not the grand huntsman interfered. Charles III. of Spain was more attached to the sports of the field than the splendour of the monarchy; and it is said that no weather, however bad, could keep him at home. In addition to a most numerous retinue of persons belonging to his hunting establishment, several times a year all the idle fellows in the neighbourhood of Madrid were hired to scour the country, far and wide, and drive the wild boars, hares, and deer into a ring, where they passed before the royal family. Charles also kept in a diary a regular account of the victims to his skill. A short time before his death he boasted to a foreign ambassador that he had killed with his own hand 539 wolves and 5323 foxes. “So that, you see,” he said, with a smile, “my diversion has not been useless to my country.” And it is further said that so devoted was his Majesty to hunting that there were only three days in the year when he did not attend the chase. Charles IV. was equally fond of hunting, and the first feeling he had of his uncrowned condition was on hearing that the new king had ordered all the wolves and foxes to be destroyed. It was not his son’s policy which disconcerted him, but the suppression of his hunting establishment, which had been his only pleasure for many years.