i] His Forerunners and Followers. 17 



courtly duties, in soothing the temporary ailments, the repeated 

 gouty attacks of his imperial master, in healing the maladies of 

 the nobles and others round the throne, and doubtless in giving 

 advice to more humble folk, who were from time to time allowed 

 to seek his aid. Whither his master went, he went too, and we 

 may well imagine that in leisure moments he entertained the 

 Emperor and the Court with his intellectual talk, telling them 

 some of the fairy tales of that realm of science which he had left, 

 and of the later achievements of which news came to him, 

 scantily, fitfully and from afar. 



When in 1556 Charles withdrew from/Ehe world and took 

 refuge in the cloister, Vesalius transferred to the son Philip II. 

 the services which he had paid to the father, and in 1559 returned 

 with him to Spain. 



Spain, as it then was, could be no home for a man of 

 science. The hand of the Church was heavy on the land ; 

 the dagger of the Inquisition was stabbing at all mental life, 

 and its torch was a sterilizing flame sweeping over all in- 

 tellectual activity. The pursuit of natural knowledge had 

 become a crime, and to search with the scalpel into the secrets 

 of the body of man was accounted sacrilege. It was for a life 

 in priest-ridden, ignorant, superstitious Madrid that Vesalius 

 had forsaken the freedom of the Venetian Republic and the 

 bright academic circles of Padua ; in Madrid, where as he himself 

 has said, "he could not lay his hand on so much as a dried skull, 

 " much less have the chance of making a dissection." Moreover, 

 he must have felt the loss of Charles, who, whatever his faults, 

 recognized the worth of intellectual efforts, and in many ways 

 had shewn his sympathy with Vesalius' love of knowledge. 

 Such sympathy could not be looked for in the narrow and 

 bigoted Philip. 



We cannot wonder that amid such surroundings the feelings 



I that the past years had been years of a wasted life grew strong 

 upon him, and that wistful memories of the earlier happy times 

 gathered head. He was still in the prime of life, a man of some 

 forty-five summers ; many years of intellectual vigour were 

 perhaps still before him. Was he to spend all these in marking 

 time to the music of an Imperial Court ? 

 " 



