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rest of the cool gamblers were playing their last desperate stake on that fatal night, really persuaded himself that the work was his, and that he had saved society. That the fly should imagine he is moving the coach is natural enough; but that the horses, and the wooden lumbering machine, and the passengers should take it for granted that the light gilded insect is carrying them all,--there is the true miracle.
We must confess to a special fancy for Philip II. He was so true a king, so vain, so superstitious, so mean and cruel, it is probable so great a king never lived. Nothing could be more royal than the way he distributed his gratitude for the victory on St. Lawrence's day. To Count Egmont, whose splendid courage and loyalty gained him the battle, he gave ignominy and death on the scaffold; and to exhibit a gratitude to a myth which he was too mean to feel to a man, he built to San Lorenzo that stupendous mass of granite which is to-day the visible demonstration of the might and the weakness of Philip and his age.
He called it the Monastery of San Lorenzo el Real, but the nomenclature of the great has no authority with the people. It was built on a site
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once covered with cinder-heaps from a long abandoned iron-mine, and so it was called in common speech the Escorial. The royal seat of San Ildefonso can gain from the general public no higher name than La Granja, the Farm. The great palace of Catharine de Medici, the home of three dynasties, is simply the Tuileries, the Tile-fields. You cannot make people call the White House the Executive Mansion. A merchant named Pitti built a palace in Florence, and though kings and grand dukes have inhabited it since, it is still the Pitti. There is nothing so democratic as language. You may alter a name by trick when force is unavailing. A noble lord in Segovia, following the custom of the good old times, once murdered a Jew, and stole his house. It was a pretty residence, but the skeleton in his closet was that the stupid commons would not call it anything but "the Jew's house." He killed a few of them for it, but that did not serve. At last, by advice of his confessor, he had the facade ornamented with projecting knobs of stucco, and the work was done. It is called to this day "the knobby house."
The conscience of Philip did not permit a long delay in the accomplishment of his vow. Charles
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