fits of great depression of spirit, when he would exclude himself from the business of the council-board.* It is said, that in early life he had consulted his maternal uncle, St. Francis Borja, on an inclination he had to assume the habit of St. Francis. The uncle dissuaded him, seeing that he had abilities for affairs of state. The wish returned again after the death of his Duchess, to whose memory Gongora inscribes a sonnet, in 1603; and again in 1612, when the court was full of rejoicings for the marriage alliances with France. It is possible that some compunction from a sense of the public waste which he could not check, and a feeling of weariness under the load of such a wide disjointed realm, may have prepared him rather to welcome his dismissal from the helm of state, when it came at last, than to pine under the disgrace.

(59.) Meanwhile the mascarades and festivals, the balls and comedies, went on with little interruption. There was that strange admixture of things sacred and things profane, which has always been observable in Spanish manners. The people of Segovia entertaining the King on a visit to them in the autumn of 1613, prepared an enormous array of masked figures, representing all the historical persons in the genealogy of the first chapter of St. Matthew, ranged in order to be present at the betrothal of the Blessed Virgin to St. Joseph. The dresses of these old fathers were so

* Contarini, 569. Cabrera, 299, 317, alibi. + Davila, 203.

Colmenares, Hist. Segov. c. xlix.

rich and grotesque, that the King would have them pass twice in procession before him. This was on a Saturday evening. The next day the same performers in the same dresses went to church,-a tableau vivant instead of a Jesse-Window.* Noble marriages, christenings, or public receptions of bishops at their sees,t were all celebrated with bull-fights. At the baptism of a grandson of the Duke of Lerma, the spectacle was such as in another country might have been called tragical; but in Spain it seems to have caused no check to the festivities. "The bulls," says Cabrera, "were reasonably good: they killed five or six people and wounded many more." And they were not at this period combatants of the lower orders who encountered this danger, but cavaliers of noble name and illustrious descent. Diego de Toledo, a son of the old Duke of Alva, was gored to death by a bull at his brother's wedding-feast.§ To vary the amusement the bull was sometimes baited with mastiff-dogs, or invited to a single combat with a lion, a tiger, or a bear: but it seems as if these beasts of prey, whose habit it is to seize their victims by surprise, were afraid to face the bull within a palisade whence there was no retreat, and slunk into a corner of the area. || Captain Sotomayor, commanding a troop of horse at Oran, when

* Cabrera, 531.

+ Gongora, Sonnets. Cabrera, 441. "Los toros fueron razonables: mataron cinco ó seis hömbres, y hirieron muchos."

? Lope de Vega, Philomena, 201.

Id. 200, 308, 557.

*

he had no Moors to employ his time with, tried his lance on the lions, the old inhabitants of the country. It does not appear whether he was the sender of the noble beast to the King's menagerie, which behaved so generously in the adventure with Don Quixote.+

(60.) The character of the Duke's more private revels was not always the most refined. Shortly after the departure of the English Envoy came the Eve of St. John, a festival kept in Spain with as much ardour as in the Orkneys. The King and Queen went to keep it at a country-seat of the great minister's, Ventosilla, near Aranda on the Duero, in Old Castille. It was a moonlight night; and their Majesties were conducted to a rural theatre of timber roofed over with boughs, where a set of actors in the MerryAndrew style travestied the scenes of state which they had lately witnessed, and turned the chief persons into farce. There were young gentlemen who put on women's dresses, and others acted the part of gallants to attend on them. The Count of Gelves, whose sudden death, after a few years' interval, threw a gloom over the gay scenes in which he had been conspicuous, acted the King; the part of the Queen was assigned to the Court Fool. The Duke's coachman dressed himself up to represent the Duke's venerable uncle, the Cardinal Archbishop; another domestic personated the Duke himself; and an unfortunate tenor-singer played Lord Howard. The performance was kept up * Davila, iii. + Don Quix. part ii. c. 17.

to a late hour of the night, and the royal pair were greatly amused with the ludicrous spectacle.*

Ventosilla still exhibits the remains of the magnificent ducal palace and gardens. It was surrounded by a spacious circuit of wood or chase, to the extent of five leagues.

(61.) The Court Fool, whose aid was called in to sustain this drollery, was as inseparable an adjunct to the Spanish abodes of Royalty as he had been to the dwellings of English kings from the time of the Conqueror to the days of the Tudors and Stuarts, or as he continued to be to the French Court under Louis XIII. and Richelieu. His description, by a Spanish writer of the time, quite accords with the records of our own celebrities in the same line: "A buffoon jester, a creature without shame, without honour, and without respect; who, thus qualified, is admitted into kingly palaces and houses of great lords, with license to say whatever his humour prompts: although, it is true, he has to pay somewhat dear for these liberties, being maltreated in all sorts of ways."+ It seems that these antitypes of Will Sommer, Pace, or Archy Armstrong, sometimes retired on a pension. One may imagine something genial in the absolute will of Henry VIII., but it is difficult to conceive with what grim pleasantry Philip II. could have entertained himself in the company of any Wamba the Witless, or poor Vice of cap and bells. The Court Fool of Philip III. was

* Cabrera, 253.

Covarrubias, Dict.; Madr., 1611.

Alcocer, or, as he was sometimes called, Alcocerico, a diminutive which may imply that he was little of stature. He was probably a poor Morisco, his name being like Arabic; and his mimicry of the Queen would be the more amusing, if he spoke, like the Alcuzcuz in Calderon's "Love after Death," in broken Castillian. He suffered his full share of practical jokes from the young courtiers, enduring such treatment as fell to the lot of the noble Captain Parolles, without any like provocation. He may, however, have been in some degree relieved of his troubles by the presence of the Court Dwarf, Stanislaus, or afterwards Simon Bonami, a Fleming, sent by the Archduchess Isabel to be the playmate of the young Prince of the Asturias. Bonami was again succeeded by Michael Soplillo, who flourished in Court Masques under Philip IV.* These dwarfs are said to have been well-shaped persons, free from any bodily deformity. And the great Bonami, as Gongora calls him in an epitaph of fine exaggeration, was a hero in his way, who would ride in the ring, and throw his tiny lance at the bull, among the champions at the game. This was much more sublime than the feat of his English counterpart, of whom we read in Ben Jonson, who amused the Londoners at a city feast by leaping into a custard.

* Ant. Mendoza's Poems, p. 152.

+ Covarruvias, Dict. v. Enano. There is a characteristic portrait of one by Velazquez, Madrid Gallery, 279.