his
reign, that, while still in bed in the morning, he was served with potted
capon, prepared with sugar, milk, and spices, and then went to sleep
again. At noon a meal of various dishes was served him, and another after
vespers. In the evening he supped heartily on anchovies, of which he was
particularly fond, or some other gross and savory food. His cooks were
often at their wits' end to devise some new dish, rich and highly seasoned
enough to satisfy his appetite, and his perplexed purveyor one day,
knowing Charles's passion for timepieces, told him "that he really did not
know what new dish he could prepare him, unless it were a _fricassee_ of
watches."

Charles drank as heartily as he ate. His huge repasts were washed down
with potations proportionately large. Iced beer was a favorite beverage,
with which he began on rising and kept up during the day. By way of a
stronger potation, Rhenish wine was much to his taste. Roger Ascham, who
saw him on St. Andrew's day dining at the feast of the Golden Fleece,
tells us: "He drank the best that I ever saw. He had his head in the glass
five times as long as any of us, and never drank less than a good quart at
once of Rhenish."

It was this over-indulgence in the pleasures of the table that brought the
emperor to Yuste. His physician warned him in vain. His confessor wasted
admonitions on his besetting sin. Sickness and suffering vainly gave him
warning to desist. Indigestion troubled him; bilious disorders brought
misery to his overworked stomach. At length came gout, the most terrible
of his foes. This enemy gave him little rest day or night. The man who had
hunted in the mountains for days without fatigue, who had kept the saddle
day and night in his campaigns, who had held his own in the lists with the
best knights of Europe, was now a miserable cripple, carried, wherever he
went, in the litter of an invalid.

One would have thought that, in his monastic retreat, Charles would cease
to indulge in gastronomic excesses, but the retired emperor, with little
else to think of, gave as much attention to his appetite as ever. Yuste
was kept in constant communication with the rest of the world on matters
connected with the emperor's table. He was especially fond of fish and all
the progeny of the water,--eels, frogs, oysters, and the like. The trout of
the neighborhood were too small for his liking, so he had larger ones sent
from a distance. Potted fish--anchovies in particu