he had doomed to disgrace,
perhaps to death, and whom he kept under constant secret supervision, in
those laborious efforts to conquer without an army and to purchase a
kingdom with an empty purse, in which, as it was destined, the very last
sands of Parma's life were to run away.

Suffering from a badly healed wound, from water on the chest,
degeneration of the heart, and gout in the limbs, dropsical, enfeebled,
broken down into an old man before his time, Alexander still confronted
disease and death with as heroic a front as he had ever manifested in the
field to embattled Hollanders and Englishmen, or to the still more
formidable array of learned pedants and diplomatists in the hall of
negotiation. This wreck of a man was still fitter to lead armies and
guide councils than any soldier or statesman that Philip could call into
his service, yet the king's cruel hand was ready to stab the dying man in
the dark.

Nothing could surpass the spirit with which the soldier was ready to do
battle with his best friend, coming in the guise of an enemy. To the last
moment, lifted into the saddle, he attended personally as usual to the
details of his new campaign, and was dead before he would confess himself
mortal. On the 3rd of December, 1592, in the city of Arran, he fainted
after retiring at his usual hour to bed, and thus breathed his last.

According to the instructions in his last will, he was laid out barefoot
in the robe and cowl of a Capuchin monk. Subsequently his remains were
taken to Parma, and buried under the pavement of the little Franciscan
church. A pompous funeral, in which the Italians and Spaniards quarrelled
and came to blows for precedence, was celebrated in Brussels, and a
statue of the hero was erected in the capitol at Rome.

The first soldier and most unscrupulous diplomatist of his age, he died
when scarcely past his prime, a wearied; broken-hearted old man. His
triumphs, military and civil, have been recorded in these pages, and his
character has been elaborately pourtrayed. Were it possible to conceive
of an Italian or Spaniard of illustrious birth in the sixteenth century,
educated in the school of Machiavelli, at the feet of Philip, as anything
but the supple slave of a master and the blind instrument of a Church,
one might for a moment regret that so many gifts of genius and valour had
been thrown away or at least lost to mankind. Could the light of truth
ever pierce the atmosphere in which such