GENERAL VIEW OF THE MONASTERY.
colleges, three chapter-houses and three libraries, with their concomitant complement of halls, dormitories, refectories and infirmaries. There are no fewer than eighty-six staircases; and someone, gifted with a turn for statistics, has calculated that to visit every individual room and to traverse each staircase and corridor, would occupy four entire days, and carry the adventurer over a distance of about a hundred and twenty English miles. The square of the building covers 500,000 feet; there are eighty-eight fountains, fifteen cloisters, sixteen courtyards, and 3,000 feet of painted fresco.
THE ESCORIAL LIBRARY.
Twenty-one years were occupied in its construction, but a century did not suffice to collect the wonderful literary treasures which it now contains. One of the most famous MSS. in the Escorial library is the “Libro de Oro,” the letters of which are composed of eight kilogrammes (18 lbs.) of gold leaf. These letters, which are of course very thin, are attached to parchment. Forty-two richly-decorated altars are to be seen in the interior of the palace church, but more wonderful in their way than the altars are the service books for the use of the choir. It is said that each leaf of each book was made from an entire calf-skin, 17,000 skins being used in the process.
MASS BOOK OF PHILIP II., THE ESCORIAL LIBRARY.
Beneath the church is the burial place of the kings of Spain; the one spot, one would imagine, where etiquette would not rule; but where, in reality, it is most rigorously observed; for right royal dust must not mingle with the dust of princes, and a separate pantheon was for this cause built for those sons of kings who had not actually worn the purple. Apart from its treasures and its curiosities, there is one quarter of the Escorial which is of particular interest to English-speaking peoples. In three small rooms, as bare as the cell of the anchorite, dwelt the husband of Queen Mary of England, that monkish and forbidding sovereign at whose command the myriad ships of the Invincible Armada were hurled against England. His ambition was to make England the appanage of Spain; all he obtained were a few English elms which still flourish in the palace gardens.
