The face, especially when young, reflects the King’s intrinsic refinement; but its length has become exaggerated, the protruding under-lip and jaw are puffed and fleshy, weakly sensual, while the eyes are apathetic. The expression of the whole is of a nature nearly worn out, that can only be stirred to occasional alertness by the stimulant of trivial excitements. Finally, in Carreño’s portrait of Charles II, (p. 132) appears a total extinction of active faculties, soft sensuousness rather than sensuality, a settled look of apathy and the profound depression of a religious monomaniac. Charles was scarcely four years old when the death of his father in 1665 made him king of a bankrupt country. It was the policy of the Queen Mother, whose regency was marked by political incompetence and personal amours, to keep her son as childish as possible. And, when he reached his majority at the age of fifteen and supplanted his mother’s influence by that of Don Juan of Austria, the latter also schemed to keep his master in a condition of mental darkness and dependence. Thus Charles was the victim alike of racial degeneracy and of thwarted development. Complete incapacity to govern himself or others was the natural result. He shunned the affairs of state, mildly supported the arts as far as the beggared state of the treasury would permit, and sank into a religious mania that found satisfaction in attending auto-da-fés and prostrating himself in acts of personal penance. Dying childless in 1700, he brought the Hapsburg line to an inglorious conclusion; and the succession passed to a branch of the Bourbon family.