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Being naturally endowed with superior parts, a penetrating intellect and rare firmness of character, he schooled himself to look Fortune in the face without being intoxicated by her smiles or troubled at her frowns, to be astonished by nothing that happened, and to make up his mind in any danger.

He had even now the will of an emperor and an overawing manner.

'His dignity and loftiness of soul are such,' says a contemporary writer, 'that he seems to hold the universe under his feet.'" Charles's position in Germany was as strong as the man himself; he was a German, a duke of Austria, of the imperial line, as natural a successor of his grandfather Maximilian at Frankfort as of his grandfather Ferdinand at Madrid.