urs he amused himself
with tools, carving toys for children, and ingenious puppets and
automata to astonish the peasants. For a time he was very happy in his
new employment. After so stormy a life, the perfect repose and freedom
from care which he enjoyed in the convent, seemed to him the perfection
of bliss. But soon the novelty wore away, and his constitutional
despondency returned with accumulated power.

His dejection now assumed the form of religious melancholy. He began to
devote every moment of his time to devotional reading and prayer,
esteeming all amusements and all employments sinful which interfered
with his spiritual exercises. He expressed to the Bishop of Toledo his
determination to devote, for the rest of his days, every moment to the
service of God. With the utmost scrupulousness he carried out this plan.
He practiced rigid fasts, and conformed to all the austerity of convent
discipline. He renounced his pension, and sitting at the abstemious
table with the monks, declined seeing any other company than that of the
world-renouncing priests and friars around him. He scourged himself with
the most cruel severity, till his back was lacerated with the whip. He
whole soul seemed to crave suffering, in expiation for his sins. His
ingenuity was tasked to devise new methods of mortification and
humiliation. Ambition had ever been the ruling passion of his soul, and
now he was ambitious to suffer more, and to abuse himself more than any
other mortal had ever done.

Goaded by this impulse, he at last devised the scheme of solemnising his
own funeral. All the melancholy arrangements for his burial were made;
the coffin provided; the emperor reclined upon his bed as dead; he was
wrapped in his shroud, and placed in his coffin. The monks, and all the
inmates of the convent attended in mourning; the bells tolled; requiems
were chanted by the choir; the funeral service was read, and then the
emperor, as if dead, was placed in the tomb of the chapel, and the
congregation retired. The monarch, after remaining some time in his
coffin to impress himself with the sense of what it is to die, and be
buried, rose from his tomb, kneeled before the altar for some time in
worship, and then returned to his cell to pass the night in deep
meditation and prayer.

The shock and the chill of this solemn scene were too much for the old
monarch's feeble frame and weakened mind. He was seized with a fever,
and in a few days breathed hi