Few can peruse the interesting life of Isabella of Castile
without being struck by the fact, that even as her public career was
one of unmixed prosperity for her country and herself, her private
sorrows and domestic trials vied, in their bitterness, with those of
the poorest and humblest of her subjects. Her first-born, the Infanta
Isabella, who united all the brilliant and endearing qualities of her
mother, with great beauty, both of face and form, became a loving
bride only to become a widow--a mother, only to gaze upon her babe,
and die; and her orphan quickly followed. Don Juan, the delight
and pride and hope of his parents, as of the enthusiasm and almost
idolatry of their subjects, died in his twentieth year. The hapless
Catherine of Arragon, with whose life of sorrow and neglect every
reader of English history is acquainted, though they sometimes forget
her illustrious parentage; her sorrows indeed Isabella was spared, as
she died before Henry the Eighth ascended the English throne. But
it was Juana, the wife of Philip, and mother of Charles V., whose
intellects, always feeble, and destroyed by the neglect and unkindness
of the husband she idolized, struck the last and fatal blow. And she,
whom all Europe regarded with unfeigned veneration--she whom her own
subjects so idolized, they would gladly have laid down a thousand
lives for hers--she fell a victim to a mother's heart-consuming
grief.
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