PETITIONS OF COLUMBUS; INJUSTICE OF THE KING.
Turning from what might have been seen by Queen Isabella, had her departing gaze pierced to the outskirts of her dominions, we have to record the closing scene of the strange eventful history of Columbus, who did not long survive his benefactress. Ever since his return from his fourth voyage to the Indies, he had done little else than memorialize, and petition, and negotiate about his rights. But Ferdinand, who had always looked coldly on his projects, was disposed to regard his claims with still less favour. Columbus professed himself willing to sacrifice the arrears of revenue due to him, but urged strenuously his demand that his son Diego should be made viceroy of the Indies, in accordance with the terms of the grant making that dignity hereditary in his family. Ferdinand did not refuse absolutely: the breach of faith would have been too flagrant. But he procrastinated, and ended by referring the matter to the significantly named Board of Discharges of the Royal Conscience, which board regulated its proceedings by the known wishes of the king, and procrastinated too.
The proverb, "Fear old age, for it does not come alone," was especially applicable to Columbus, while suffering sickness without the elasticity to bear it, poverty with high station and debt, and all the delay of suitorship, not at the beginning, but at the close, of a career. A similar decline of fortune is to be seen in the lives of many men; of those, too, who have been most adventurous and successful in their prime. Their fortunes grow old and feeble with themselves; and those clouds, which were but white and scattered during the vigour of the day, sink down together, stormful and massive, in huge black lines, across the setting sun.