the weak dregs of the line of Valois. The League
would willingly have transferred the French crown to any person whom he
might have named to wear it; and perhaps nothing but the sensible
decision of Henry IV., that Paris was worth a mass, prevented that crown
from passing to some member of the Spanish branch of the House of
Austria. In Germany Philip had an influence corresponding to his power,
which was all the greater because he was the head of a Germanic house
that under him seemed destined to develop an old idea that it should
become ruler of the world. If anything marred his strength in that
quarter, it was the fact that the junior branch of the Austrian family
was at that time inclined to liberalism in politics,--an offence against
the purposes and traditions of the whole family of which few members of
it have ever been guilty, before or since.

But this mighty Spanish power came to an end with the monarch in whom it
was represented. The sources of Spanish strength had been drying up for
a century, but the personal character of the successive monarchs, and
vast foreign acquisitions, had disguised the fact from the world. Philip
died in 1598, and in reality left his empire but a skeleton to his son,
a youth of feeble mind, but under whose rule a change of policy was
effected, not, as has been sometimes supposed, from any deep views on
the part of the Count-Duke Lerma, but because it was impossible for
Spain to maintain the place she had held under Philip II. Even had
Philip III. been as able a man as his father, or his grandfather, he
could not have preserved the ascendency of Spain,--that country having
changed much, and Europe more. Every European nation, with the exception
of Turkey,--and the Turks were only encamped in Europe,--had advanced
during the sixteenth century, except Spain, which had declined. Thus had
she become weak, positively and relatively. Rest was necessary to her,
and under the rule of Lerma she obtained it. He supported the peace
policy of that old aristocratical party of which Ruy Gomez had been the
chief, but which had been hardly heard of in the last twenty years of
Philip II.'s reign. That monarch, on his death-bed, regretted that "to
his grace in bestowing on him so great a realm, God had not been pleased
to add the grace of granting him a successor capable of continuing to
rule it"; but had his son been all that the most unreasonable parent
could have desired, he could not have pursued h