subtle and so ruthless, so disciplined and so loyal withal: but
Alva was a man who was not given to speak his mind, but to act it.

One would wish, too, for a glimpse of what was passing through the mind
of another man, who has been daily in that sick chamber, according to
Olivarez' statement, since the first of the month: but he is one who has
had, for some years past, even more reason than Alva for not speaking his
mind. What he looked like we know well, for Titian has painted him from
the life--a tall, bold, well-dressed man, with a noble brain, square and
yet lofty, short curling locks and beard, an eye which looks as though it
feared neither man nor fiend--and it has had good reason to fear both--and
features which would be exceeding handsome, but for the defiant
snub-nose. That is Andreas Vesalius, of Brussels, dreaded and hated by
the doctors of the old school--suspect, moreover, it would seem, to
inquisitors and theologians, possibly to Alva himself; for he has dared
to dissect human bodies; he has insulted the medievalists at Paris,
Padua, Bologna, Pisa, Venice, in open theatre; he has turned the heads of
all the young surgeons in Italy and France; he has written a great book,
with prints in it, designed, some say, by Titian--they were actually done
by another Netherlander, John of Calcar, near Cleves--in which he has
dared to prove that Galen's anatomy was at fault throughout, and that he
had been describing a monkey's inside when he had pretended to be
describing a man's; and thus, by impudence and quackery, he has wormed
himself--this Netherlander, a heretic at heart, as all Netherlanders are,
to God as well as to Galen--into the confidence of the late Emperor
Charles V., and gone campaigning with him as one of his physicians,
anatomising human bodies even on the battle-field, and defacing the
likeness of Deity; and worse than that, the most religious King Philip is
deceived by him likewise, and keeps him in Madrid in wealth and honour;
and now, in the prince's extreme danger, the king has actually sent for
him, and bidden him try his skill--a man who knows nothing save about
bones and muscles and the outside of the body, and is unworthy the name
of a true physician.

One can conceive the rage of the old Spanish pedants at the
Netherlander's appearance, and still more at what followed, if we are to
believe Hugo Bloet of Delft, his countryman and contemporary. {390}
Vesalius, he says, saw that the surgeons