The Escurial and Toledo.
A railroad is now open from Madrid which passes by the palace; so at half-past six, one morning, they took their places in the train, which soon carried them away from the cultivated environs of the city to a country which, for desolation, wildness, and grandeur, resembles the scenery at Nicolosi in the ascent of Etna. In the midst of this rugged mass of rocks and scrubby oak-trees, the large gloomy Escurial rises up, under the shadow, as it were, of the snowy jagged peaks of the Sierra Guadarama, which forms its background. There is a picture of it, by Rubens, in the gallery at Longford Castle, near Salisbury, which gives the best possible idea of the complete isolation of the great building itself, and of the savage character of the whole of the surrounding country.
Leaving the train, our party went to present their letters to the principal, Padre G——, who very kindly showed them everything most worth seeing in the place. It is a gigantic pile of masonry, built by Philip II. as a thanksgiving for the success of the battle of St. Quentin, and in the shape of a grid-iron, being dedicated to St. Laurence, on the day of whose martyrdom the vow was made. "Celui qui faisait un si grand voeu doit avoir eu grande peur!" was the saying of the Duke of Braganza; and the gloomy, cold, gray character of the whole place is but the reflex of the king's temperament. He employed the famous architect Herrera, whose genius was, however, much cramped by the king's insistence on the shape being maintained. It was finished in 1584.
The Jeronimite monks have been scattered to the winds, and the convent has been turned into a college; they have about 250 students. The church is large and solemn, but bare and uninviting, dismal and sombre, like all the rest. The choir is up-stairs, with fine carved stalls, among which is that of Philip II., who always said office with the monks. The painted ceiling is by Luca Giordano. The choir-books are more than 200 in number, in virgin calf, and of gigantic size; some of them are beautifully illuminated. At the back, in a small gallery, with a window looking on the great piazza below, is the famous white marble Christ, the size of life, by Benvenuto Cellini, given to Philip II. by the Grand Duke of Florence. On certain days it is exposed to the people from the window; but wonderful as may be its anatomy, the expression is both painful and commonplace. Beneath the church is the famous crypt containing the bodies of all the kings and queens of Spain since Charles V., arranged in niches round the octagonal chapel. Each niche contains a black marble sarcophagus; the kings on the right, and the queens on the left. Here mass is always said on All Souls' Day, and on the anniversaries of their deaths. The present queen came once, and looked at the empty urn waiting for her, but did not repeat the experiment. "I have come once of my own freewill," she is supposed to have said, "but the next time I shall be brought here without it." It is a dismal resting-place; the damp, cold, slippery stairs by which you descend into it from the church seem to chill one's very blood, and the profound darkness, only lit up here and there by the flicker of the guide's torch, with the reverberation caused by the closing of the heavy iron door, till the thoughts with visions of death, uncheered by hope, and of a prison rather than a grave. Ascending with a feeling of positive relief to the church above, Padre G—— took them into the sacristy, which is a beautiful long, low room, with arabesque ceilings, and at the further end of which is a very fine picture by Coello, representing the apotheosis of the "Forma," or miraculous wafer: the heads are all portraits, and admirably executed. At the back is the little chapel or sanctuary where the "Forma" is kept and exhibited twice a year. Charles II. erected the gorgeous altar with the following inscription:
En magni operis miraculum intra miraculum mundi,
coeli miraculum consecratum.
The legend states that at the battle of Gorcum, in 1525, the Zuinglian heretics scattered and trampled on the Sacred Host, which bled; and being gathered up and carefully preserved by the faithful, was afterward given by Rudolph II. to Philip II., which event is represented in a bas-relief. In this sacristy are also some vestments of which the embroidery is the most exquisite thing possible; the faces of the figures are like beautiful miniatures, so that it is difficult to believe they are done in needlework. [Footnote 248]
[Footnote 248: In the Dominican convent of Stone, in Staffordshire, the same exquisite work is now being reproduced; which proves that the art is not, as is generally supposed, extinct.]
But the great treasures of this church are its relics, of which the quantity is enormous. They are arranged in gigantic cupboards or "étagères," stretching from the floor to the ceiling, the doors of which are carefully concealed by the pictures which hang over them, above both the high altar and the two side altars at the east end. There are more than 7,000 relics, of which the most interesting are those of St. Laurence himself, (his skull, his winding-sheet, the iron bars of his gridiron, etc..) the head of St. Hermengilde, sent to the king from Seville, and the arm and head of St. Agatha. The reliquaries are also very beautiful, some of them of very fine cinquecento work. These are down-stairs. Up-stairs is a kind of secret chapel, where there are some things which were still more interesting to our travellers. Here are four MS. books of St. Theresa's, all written by her own hand; her Life, written by command of her confessor. Padre Bánez, with a voucher of its authenticity from him at the end; her Path of Perfection; her Constitutions and Foundations; also her inkstand and pen. Her handwriting is more like a man's than a woman's, and is beautifully clear and firm. There is also a veil worked in a kind of crochet by St. Elizabeth of Hungary, and sent by her to St. Margaret; a beautiful illuminated Greek missal, once belonging to St. Chrysostom; a pot from Cana in Galilee; a beautifully carved ivory diptych; the body of one of the Holy Innocents, sent from Bethlehem; some exquisite ivory and coral reliquaries, etc. From the church our party went up by a magnificent staircase to the library, which though despoiled, like everything else during the French invasion, still contains some invaluable books and MSS. There is an illuminated Apocalypse of the fourteenth century, most exquisitely painted on both sides; a very fine copy of the Koran; many other beautiful missals; and in a room down-stairs, not generally shown to travellers, are some thousands of manuscripts, among which are a wonderful illuminated copy of the Miracles of the Virgin, in Portuguese and Gallego, of the eleventh century, most quaint and funny in design and execution; also a very curious illuminated book of chess problems and other games, written by order of the king Alonso el Sabio. It is a library where one might spend days and days with ever-increasing pleasure, if it were not for the cold, which, to our travellers, fresh from the burning sun of Seville, seemed almost unendurable. The cloisters, refectory, and kitchens are all on the most magnificent scale. In the wing set aside for the private apartments of the royal family, but which they now rarely occupy, the thing most worth looking at is the tapestry, made in Madrid, at the Barbara factory, (now closed,) from drawings by Teniers and Goya. They are quite like beautiful paintings, both in expression and color, though some of the subjects and scenes are of questionable propriety. There is a suite of small rooms with beautiful inlaid doors and furniture; a few good pictures, (among a good deal of rubbish,) especially one of Bosch, known as that of The Dog and the Fly; and a very interesting gallery or corridor, covered with frescoes, representing the taking of Granada on the one side and the battle of St. Quentin on the other, the victory of Lepanto occupying the spaces at the two ends. These frescoes are very valuable, both as portraits and as representing the costumes and arms of the period. They were said to be facsimile copies of original drawings, done on cloths on the actual spots. That of St. Quentin was specially interesting to one of the party, whose ancestor fought there, and in whose house in England (Wilton Abbey) is still shown the armor of Ann Conétable de Montmorency, of the Duc de Montpensier, of Admiral Coligni, and of other French prisoners taken by him in that memorable battle. Beyond this gallery is the little business-room or study of Philip II., with his chair, his gouty stool, his writing-table, his well-worn letter book, and two old pictures, one of the Seven Deadly Sins, the other an etching (of 1572) of the Virgin and Saints. Out of this tiny den is a kind of recess, with a window looking on the high altar in which he caused his couch to be laid when he was dying. The death-struggle was prolonged for fifty-three days of almost continuous agony, during which time he went on holding in his hand the crucifix which Charles V. had when he expired, and which is still religiously preserved. The gardens in front of this magnificent palace are very quaint and pretty, the beds being cut in a succession of terraces overlooking the plains below, and bordered with low box hedges cut in prim shapes, with straight gravel walks, beautiful fountains, and marble seats. But it is not difficult to understand why the poor queen prefers the sunny slopes of La Granja, or even the dulness of the green avenues of Aranjuez, to this gloomy pile, where the snow hardly ever melts in the cold shade of those inner courts, and where all the associations are of death in its most repulsive form. Above the Escurial, half-way up the mountain, is a rude seat of boulder stones, from whence it is said Philip II. used to watch the progress of the huge building.
Returning to the railway station, our travellers walked down the hill and through a pleasantly wooded avenue to a little "maisonnette" of the Infanta, built for Charles IV. when heir-apparent, and containing some beautiful ivories and Wedgwoods. The gardens are pretty and bright, but the whole thing is too small to be anything but a child's toy. An accident on the line, somewhere near Avila, detained our party for six mortal hours at a wretched little wayside station, of which the authorities flatly refused to put on a short special train, although there were a large number of passengers, in addition to our travellers, waiting, like them, to return to Madrid. But the Spanish mind cannot take in the idea of any one being in a hurry. "Ora!" "Mañana!" (By and by! To-morrow!) are the despairing words which meet one at every turn in this country. In this instance, neither horses nor carriages being procurable, by which the journey to Madrid (only twenty miles) could have been accomplished with perfect facility by road, our travellers had nothing left for it but to wait. Patience, and such sleep as could be got on a hard bench, were their only resource until one in the morning, when the night express fortunately came up, and, after some demur, agreed to take them back to Madrid.
Too tired the following day to start early again for Toledo, as they had intended, our party took advantage of the kindness of the English minister to see the queen's private library, which is in one of the wings of the large but uninteresting modern palace. The librarian good-naturedly showed them some of the rarest of his treasures: among them is a beautiful missal, bound in shagreen, with lovely enamel clasps and exquisite illuminations, which had belonged to Queen Isabella of Castile; her arms, Arragon on one side and Castile on the other, were worked into the illuminations on the cover. There was a still older missal illuminated in 1315, in which is found the first mention of St. Louis in the Kalendar. Here also are some of the first books printed in type, and a very fine MS. Greek copy of Aristotle.