men and things around him, yet devoutly believing his master the greatest prince that ever had been or was to be; proud of himself, his family, and his services, and inclined, in a grave decorous way, to exaggerate their importance; a true son of the church, with an instinctive distrust of its ministers; a hater of Jews, Turks, heretics, friars, and Flemings; somewhat testy, somewhat obstinate, full of strong sense and strong prejudice; a warm-hearted, energetic, and honest man.

Martin Gaztelu, the secretary, comes next to the mayordomo in order of precedence, and in the importance of his functions. His place was one of great trust. The whole correspondence of the emperor passed through his hands. Even the most private and confidential communications addressed to the princess-regent by her father, were generally written, at his dictation, by Gaztelu; for the imperial fingers were seldom sufficiently free from gout to be able to do more than add a brief postscript, in which Doña Juana was assured of the affection of her buen padre Carlos. The secretary had probably spent his life in the service of the emperor; but I have been unable to learn more of his history than his letters have preserved. His epistolary style was clear, simple, and business-like, but inferior to that of Quixada in humour, and in careless graphic touch, and more sparing in glimpses of the rural life of Estremadura three hundred years ago.

William Van Male, or, as the Spaniards called him, Malines, or, in that Latin form in which his name still lingers in the bye-ways of literature, Malineus, was the scholar and man of letters of the society. Born at Bruges, of a noble but decayed family, and with a learned education for his sole patrimony, he went to seek his fortune in Spain, and the service of the duke of Alba, an iron soldier, who cherished the arts of

peace with a discerning love very rare in his profession and his country. He afterwards turned his thoughts towards the church, but not obtaining any preferment, he did not receive the tonsure. About 1548, Don Luis

de Avila, grand-commander of Alcantara, and a soldier, historian, and court favourite of great eminence, engaged him to put into Latin his commentaries on the wars in Germany, holding out hopes of placing him, in return, in the imperial household. Van Male executed his task with much elegance,' but Avila failed to fulfil the hopes he had excited, although the modest ambition of his translator did not soar beyond the post of historiographer, and two hundred florins a year. Another and a better friend, however, the Seigneur de Praet, obtained for Van Male, in 1550, the place of barbero, or gentleman of the imperial chamber of the second class.

His learning, intelligence, industry, cheerful disposition, and simple nature, made him a great favourite with the emperor, who soon could scarcely dispense with his attendance by day or night. With a strong natural taste for arts and letters, Charles, often during his busy life, regretted that his imperfect early education debarred him from many literary pursuits and pleasures. In Van Male he had found a humble instrument, ever ready, able, and willing to supply his deficiencies. Sailing up the Rhine in 1550, he beguiled the tedium of the voyage by composing a memoir of his campaigns and travels. The new gentleman of the chamber was employed on his old task of translation; and he accordingly turned the emperor's French, which he likewise pronounced to be terse, elegant, and eloquent, into Latin,

1 Ludov. de Avila Commentariorum de Bello Germanico a Caroli Casare gesto lib. ii. 8vo, Antverpiæ, 1550. It was printed by Steels, who reprinted it the same year; and another edition was published in 12mo, at Strasburg, in 1620.

in which he put forth his whole strength, and combined, as he supposed, the styles of Livy, Cæsar, Suetonius, and Tacitus.

Another of the emperor's literary recreations was to make a version, in Castillian prose, of the old and popular French poem, called Le Chevalier Délibéré, an allegory, composed some twenty years before, by Oliver de la Marche, in honour of the ducal house of Burgundy. Fernando de Acuña, a soldier-poet, and at that time keeper of the captive elector, George Frederick of Saxony, was then commanded to turn it into rhyme, a task which he performed very happily, working up the emperor's prose into spirited and richly-idiomatic verse, retouching and refreshing the antiquated flattery of the last century, and stealing, here and there, a chaplet from the old Burgundian monument to hang upon the shrine of Aragon and Castille. The manuscript was finally given to Van Male, in order to be passed through the press, the emperor telling him that he might have the profits of the publication for his pains, but forbidding that the book should contain any allusion to his own share in its production. Against this condition Van Male remonstrated, knowing, no doubt, that the name of the imperial translator would sell the book far more speedily and certainly than any possible merit of the translation, and alleging that such a condition was an injustice both to the honourable vocation of letters and to the world at large. The emperor, however, was inflexible, and the Spanish courtiers wickedly affected the greatest envy at the good fortune of the Fleming. Luis de Avila, with special malice, in his quality of author assured the emperor that the book would yield a profit of five hundred crowns, upon which Charles, charmed at being generous at no cost at all, remarked, 'Well, it is right that William, who has had the greatest

part of the sweat, should reap the harvest.' Poor Van Male saw no prospect of reaping anything but chaff; he timidly hinted at the risk of the undertaking, and did his best to escape the threatened boon. But hints were thrown away on the emperor; he was eager to see himself in type; and he accordingly ordered Jean Steels to strike off, at Van Male's expense, two thousand copies of a book which is now scarce, perhaps because the greater part of the impression passed at once from the publisher to the pastrycook. The pecuniary results have not been recorded, but there is little doubt that the Fleming's fears were justified rather than the hopes of the malicious companions, whom he called, in his vexation,' those windy Spaniards.'

During the six harassed and sickly years which preceded the emperor's abdication, Van Male was his constant attendant, and usually slept in an adjoining room, to be ever within call. Many a sleepless night Charles beguiled by hearing the poor scholar read the Vulgate, and illustrate it by citations from Josephus or other writers; and sometimes they sang psalms together, a devotional exercise of which the emperor was very fond. He had composed certain prayers for his own use, which he now required Van Male to put into Latin, and otherwise correct and arrange. The work was so well executed that Charles several times spoke, in the hearing of some of the other courtiers, of the comfort he had found in praying in Van Male's terse and elegant Latinity instead of his own rambling French. This praise from the master produced the usual envy among the servants; the chaplains, especially, were indignant that a layman should have thus poached upon their peculiar ground and be praised for it, and they assailed him with all kinds of coarse jests, and saluted him by a Greek name signifying praying-master. They did not,

however, undermine his credit; the emperor treated him with undiminished confidence; he alone was present when the doctors Vesalius and Baersdorp were wrangling over the symptoms and diseases of his master's shattered frame; and, as he watched through the long winter nights by the imperial couch, he was admitted to a nearer view than any other man had ever attained of the history and the workings of that ardent, reserved, and commanding mind. 'I was struck dumb,' he wrote to his friend, De Praet, after one of these mysterious confidences, and I even now tremble at the recollection of the things which he told me.'

The small collection of letters to De Praet' contain nearly all that is known of the life of Van Male. These letters were written for the most part in 1550, 1551, and 1552, sometimes by the emperor's bedside, and often long after midnight, when his tossings had subsided into slumber. Lively and agreeable as letters, they are invaluable for the glimpses they afford of the everyday life of Charles. In them we can look at the hero of the sixteenth century with the eyes of his valet. We can see him in his various moods-now well and cheerful, now bilious and peevish; ever suffering from his fatal love of eating, (edacitas damnosa,) yet never able to restrain it; rebelling against the prudent rules of Baersdorp and the great Vesalius, and appealing to one Caballo, (Caballus, by Van Male called onagrus magnus,) a Spanish quack, whose dietary was whatever his patient liked to eat and drink: calling for his iced beer before daybreak, and then repenting at the warn

1 Lettres sur la vie intérieure de l'Empereur Charles Quint., ecrites par Guillaume Van Male, publiées par le Baron de Beiffenberg, 8vo. Bruxelles: 1843. M. Reiffenberg has fallen into an error in supposing (p. xxiii.) that Van Male retired from the emperor's service at the time of the abdication.