His grey head was whitening fast.

He was sixty years of age.

His frame was slight, his figure stooping, his digestion very weak, his manner more glacial and sepulchral than ever; but if there were a hard-working man in Europe, that man was Philip II.

And there he sat at his table, scrawling his apostilles.

The fine innumerable threads which stretched across the surface of Christendom, and covered it as with a net, all converged in that silent cheerless cell.