The faults, the traits, of Alfonso XII were inherited. Even his death, less than eleven years after his coronation, is said to have been caused by constitutional ills. But, so far as he could, he nobly lived up to his intentions to give Spain peace and renewed prosperity. Six years before the people had shouted, “Away with the Bourbons!” yet here again was a Bourbon on the throne. He could not forget the line from which he descended, nor the treatment his mother, also a Bourbon, had received; yet his reign approached what the people had so long desired. Able ministers assisted him, according to the humour of the hour: first under General Martinez Campos; then under the leadership of Canovas del Castillo; again under the liberal Señor Sagasta. Through all these changes, however, Alfonso preserved the goodwill of his subjects; yet he was the object of the base assassin’s aim on three different occasions. Despite the good offices of imperial match–makers, who would have married him to some great princess of a reigning house in Europe, Alfonso persisted in wedding his own choice. He married his cousin, Marie de las Mercedes, daughter of the Duke of Montpensier—a love–match which death disrupted less than six months later. Kings may marry, but kings may not mourn; so within another six months he was united to the Archduchess Maria Christina, niece of the Emperor of Austria, who, the story goes, when she had heard of Alfonso’s first marriage, was so disappointed that she entered a convent. A child was born and named Mercedes, after the former queen; then yet another daughter; but no male heir to the throne before the death of the king, which occurred on the 25th of November, 1885. Whether his death was caused by excesses, as has been sometimes charged, or by his chivalrous insistence upon visiting the afflicted cholera districts of his kingdom, mattered little to the people, who mourned sincerely for their brave young king, cut off in the flower of his manhood, with his great schemes unaccomplished. For the first time since the death of Ferdinand VII, more than fifty years before, the vaults in the Escorial were opened for the reception of another occupant. In accordance with an ancient custom, when the funeral cortège arrived at the door of the Escorial, the keeper within demanded, “Who would enter here?” One of the attendants answered, “Alfonso XII would enter,” and the door was thrown open. Even then Alfonso was not considered as officially defunct, until the lord chamberlain, drawing back the cloth of gold covering his features, addressed him: “Señor, señor, señor,” and, receiving no reply, said solemnly: “His Majesty does not answer; then indeed the king is dead!”