n injury may
have serious consequences. However, for nine days the wound goes on
well, and Don Carlos, having had a wholesome fright, is, according to
Doctor Olivarez, the _medico de camara_, a very good lad, and lives on
chicken broth and dried plums. But on the tenth day comes on numbness of
the left side, acute pains in the head, and then gradually shivering,
high fever, erysipelas. His head and neck swell to an enormous size;
then comes raging delirium, then stupefaction, and Don Carlos lies as one
dead.

A modern surgeon would, probably, thanks to that training of which
Vesalius may be almost called the father, have had little difficulty in
finding out what was the matter with the luckless lad, and little
difficulty in removing the evil, if it had not gone too far. But the
Spanish physicians were then, as many of them are said to be still, as
far behind the world in surgery as in other things; and indeed surgery
itself was then in its infancy, because men, ever since the early Greek
schools of Alexandria had died out, had been for centuries feeding their
minds with anything rather than with facts. Therefore the learned
morosophs who were gathered round Don Carlos's sick bed had become,
according to their own confession, utterly confused, terrified, and at
their wits' end.

It is the 7th of May, the eighteenth day after the accident, according to
Olivarez' story: he and Dr. Vega have been bleeding the unhappy prince,
enlarging the wound twice, and torturing him seemingly on mere guesses.
"I believe," says Olivarez, "that all was done well: but as I have said,
in wounds in the head there are strange labyrinths." So on the 7th they
stand round the bed in despair. Don Garcia de Toledo, the prince's
faithful governor, is sitting by him, worn out with sleepless nights, and
trying to supply to the poor boy that mother's tenderness which he has
never known. Alva too is there, stern, self-compressed, most terrible,
and yet most beautiful. He has a God on earth, and that is Philip his
master; and though he has borne much from Don Carlos already, and will
have to bear more, yet the wretched lad is to him as a son of God, a
second deity, who will by right divine succeed to the inheritance of the
first; and he watches this lesser deity struggling between life and death
with an intensity of which we, in these less loyal days, can form no
notion. One would be glad to have a glimpse of what passed through that
mind, so