LIFE A N D VOYAGES OF
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[BOOK X V I I I .
amidst the obsequious homages of a court, surrounded by the tro phies of a glorious and successful reign, and placed at the summit of earthly grandeur. A deep and incurable melancholy settled upon her, which undermined her constitution, and gave a fatal acuteness to her bodily maladies. After four months of illness, she died on the 26th of November, 1504, at Medina del Campo, in the fifty-fourth year of her age ; but long before her eyes closed upon the world, her heart had closed on all its pomps and vanities. “ Let my body,” said she in her will, “ be interred in the monastery of San Francisco, which is in the Alhambra of the city of Granada, in a low sepulchre, without any monument except a plain stone, with the inscription cut on it. But I desire and command, that if the king, my lord, should choose a sepul chre in any church or monastery in any other part or place of these my kingdoms, my body be transported thither, and buried beside the body of his highness ; so that the union we have enjoyed while living, and which, through the mercy of God, we hope our souls will experience in heaven, may be represented by our bodies in the earth.”* Such was one of several passages in the will of this admirable woman, which bespoke the chastened humility of her heart ; and in which, as has been well observed, the affections of conjugal love were delicately entwined with piety, and with the most ten der melancholy.† She was one of the purest spirits that ever * The dying command of Isabella has been obeyed.
The author of this
work has seen her tomb in the royal chapel of the Cathedral of Granada, in which her remains are interred with those of Ferdinand.
Their effigies, sculp
tured in white marble, lie side by side on a magnificent sepulchre.
The altar
of the chapel is adorned with bas reliefs representing the conquest and surren der of Granada. † Elogio de la Reina Catolica por D. Diego Clemencin.
Illustration 19.