rs in order and
retired into the young and still struggling society of Ignatius Loyola.
In the year 1548, the thirty-eighth of his age, he ceased to be duke of
Gandia, and became father Francis of the Company of Jesus.

Borja did not appear at Yuste as a chance or uninvited guest. Charles
seems to have regarded him with an affection as strong as his cold
nature was capable of entertaining. It was with no ordinary interest
that he watched the career of the man whom alone he had chosen to make
the confidant of his intended abdication, and who had unexpectedly
forestalled him in the execution of the scheme. They were now in
circumstances in some respects similar, in others widely different. Both
had voluntarily descended from the eminence of their hereditary
fortunes. Broken in health and spirits, the emperor had come to Yuste to
rest and to die. The duke, on the other hand, in the full vigor of his
age, had entered the humblest of the religious orders, to work out his
salvation in a course of self-denial and toil, ending only in the grave.
His career in the Company began with severe theological study, from
which he passed to the pulpit and the professor's chair. As provincial
of Aragon and Andalusia, he had been for some time laboring as a
preacher, and teacher in various cities of Spain; he had founded
colleges at Plasencia and Seville; and he was now delivering lectures at
Alcala, in the college which Jesuit energy soon raised to be the stately
pile which still forms one of the most prominent ruins of that Palmyra
of universities.

It seems to have been in the early spring of the year 1557, that the
emperor determined to send for his old companion and counsellor. The
message was conveyed to Alcala by a servant of the count of Oropesa.
Borja at first excused himself, pleading ill-health and the duties of
his calling; and it was not until he had received a second summons, from
the mouth of the duke of Medina-Celi, that he consented to go to Yuste.
On the way he was met by a messenger, bearing a letter from the regent
Juana, which advised him that her father's object in seeking an
interview was to persuade him to pass from the Company into the order of
St. Jerome. He arrived at the monastery early in December, attended by
two brothers of the order, father Marcos, and father Bartolome
Bustamente, the latter known to fame as a scholar, and as architect of
the noble hospital of St. John Baptist at Toledo. The emperor not onl