To a person of this character it mattered little, as far as the essentials of existence were concerned, whether his life were passed upon a throne or at an attorney's desk. In the latter situation, his fondness for using the pen would well have qualified him for the drudgery, his admirable patience would have been sufficiently exercised, and the mischief he was able to do would have been on a more contracted scale. On the throne, his labors, as his admirers tell us, were those of "a poor clerk earning his bread," while his recreations were those of a Jeronymite monk. His intercourse with mankind was limited to the narrowest range of which his position would allow. Even with his ministers he preferred to communicate in writing. When he went abroad, it was in a carriage so constructed as to screen him entirely from view, and to shut out the world from his observation. He always entered Madrid after nightfall, and reached his palace by streets that were the least frequented. He had an equally strong aversion to bodily exercise. Such was his love of quiet and seclusion, that it was commonly believed he waited only for a favorable opportunity to follow the example of his father, resign his power and withdraw to a convent.[3]
In the volume before us are two chapters devoted to the character and personal habits of Philip, a picture of his court, his method of transacting business, his chief advisers, the machinery of his government, and his relations with his subjects. As usually happens, it is in details of a personal and biographical kind that the author's investigations have been the most productive of new discoveries. It is a question with some minds, whether such details are properly admitted into history. The new luminary of moral and political science, the Verulam of the nineteenth century, Mr. Henry Buckle, tells us that biography forms no part of history, that individual character has little or no effect in determining the course of the world's affairs, and that the historian's proper business is to exhibit those general laws, discoverable, by a strictly scientific process of investigation, which act with controlling power upon human conduct and govern the destinies of our race. We readily admit that the discovery of such laws would exceed in importance every other having relation to man's present sphere of existence; and we heartily wish that Mr. Buckle had made as near an approach to the discovery as he confidently believes himself to have done. But even had he, instead of crude theories, unwarranted assumptions, and a most lively but fallacious train of reasoning, presented us with a grand and solid philosophical work, a true _Novum Organon_, he would still have left the department of literature which he has so violently assailed in full possession of its present field. Our curiosity in regard to the character and habits of the men who have played conspicuous parts on the stage of history would have been not a whit diminished. The interest which men feel in the study of human character is, perhaps, the most common feeling that induces them to read at all. It is to gratify that feeling that the great majority of books are written. The mutual influences of mind upon mind--not the influences of climate, food, the "aspects of Nature," thunder-storms, earthquakes, and statistics--form, and will ever form, the great staple of literature. Mr. Buckle's own book would not have been half so entertaining as it is, if he had not, with the most natural inconsistency, plentifully besprinkled his pages with biographical details, some of which are not incorrect. Lord Macaulay, whom Mr. Buckle is unable to eulogize with sufficient vehemence without a ludicrous as well as irreverent application of Scriptural language, is of all writers the most profuse in the description of individual peculiarities, neatly doing up each separate man in a separate parcel with an appropriate label, and dismissing half his personages, like "ticket-of-leave men," with a "character," and nothing more.