Twenty-five years ago, an Englishman who was by nature distrustful of popular verdicts, and who had made careful studies of certain epochs of Spanish history, ventured to paint Philip in fresh colours. Mr. Martin Hume’s monograph shows us a cultivated gentleman, with a correct taste in architecture and art, sober, abstemious, kind to petitioners, loyal and affectionate to his friends, generous to his soldiers and sailors; a man beloved by his own household, and reverenced by his subjects, to whom he brought nothing but misfortune. The book makes melancholy reading, because Philip’s political sins were also political blunders; his mad intolerance was a distortion, rather than a rejection, of conscience; and his inconceivable rigidity left him helpless to face the essential readjustments of life. “I could not do otherwise than I have done,” he said with piercing sincerity, “though the world should fall in ruins around me.” Now what befell Mr. Hume who wrote history in this fashion, with no more liking for Philip than for Elizabeth or the Prince of Orange, but with a natural desire to get within the purlieus of truth? Certain empty honours were conferred upon him: a degree from Cambridge, membership in a few societies, the privilege of having some letters printed after his name. But the University of Glasgow and the University of Liverpool stoutly refused to give him the chairs of history and Spanish. He might know more than most men on these subjects; but they did not want their students exposed to new impressions. The good old way for them. Mr. Hume, being a reader, may have recalled in bitterness of spirit the words of the acute and unemotional Sully, who had scant regard for Catholicism (though the Huguenots tried him sorely), and none at all for Spain; but who said, in his balanced, impersonal way, that Philip’s finer qualities, his patience, piety, fortitude and single-mindedness, were all alike “lost on the vulgar.” Lucrezia Borgia is less available for our purpose, because the imaginary Lucrezia, though not precisely beloved, is more popular in her way than the real Lucrezia could ever hope to be. “In the matter of pleasantness,” says Lucian, “truth is far surpassed by falsehood”; and never has it been more agreeably overshadowed than in this fragment of Italian history. We really could not bear to lose the Lucrezia of romance. She has done fatigue duty along every line of iniquity. She has specialized in all of the seven deadly sins. On Rossetti’s canvas, in Donizetti’s opera, in Victor Hugo’s play, in countless poems and stories and novels, she has erred exhaustively for our entertainment. The image of an attractive young woman poisoning her supper guests is one which the world will not lightly let go.