PHILIP THE SECOND.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3201, 1 October 1881, Page 3

PHILIP THE SECOND.

If Charles V. -was prematurely old, Philip, on the other hand, looked as if he had never been young. He did not attain to middle height. His small hody was mounted on thin legs. Nature had not fitted him to shine in either the sports of the tournament' or the conflicts of the battle-field ; and both h& shunned. He had the ample brow, the blue eyes, and the aquiline nose of his father; but these agreeable features were forgotten in the ugliness of the under part of the face. His lower jaw protruded. It was n, Burgundian deformity, but in Philip's case it had received a larger than the usual family development. To this disagreeable feature was added another impulsive one, also a family peculiarity, a heavy hanging underlip, which enlarged the apparent size of his mouth, and strengthened the impression, which the unpleasant protrusion of the jaw made on the spectator, of animal voracity and eavageness. The puny, meagre, eickly-looking man who stiop4 beside the -warlike and once

robust form of Charles, was not more unlike his father in body than he was unlike him in mind. Not one of his father's great qualities did he possess. He lacked his statesmanship ; he had no knowledge of men, he could not enter into their feelings, nor accommodate himself to their ways, nor manifest any sympathy in what engaged and engrossed them ; he therefore shunned them. He had the shy, shrinking air of the valetudinarian, and looked round with something like the scowl of the misanthrope on His face. Charles moved about from province to province of his vast dominions, speaking the language and conforming to the manners of the people among whom he chanced for the time to be ; he was at home in all places, Philip was a stranger everywhere, save in Spain. He spoke no language but his mother tongue. Amid the gay and witty Italians—amid the familiar and courteous Flemings—amid the frank and open Germans—Philip was still the Spaniard ; austere, haughty, taciturn, unapproachable. Only one quality did he share with his father—the intense passion, namely, for extinguishing the Reformation. —The History of Protestantism, by the Eev. Dr. Wylie.