It was his first visit to the Northern
provinces of his native country, and he was
burning to see the "edificio." To him,
evidently, there was but one edifice in the
world, and that was the Escorial. When
at last he caught sight of its sullen façades,
its stunted dome and blue slate roofs, the
little Andalusian fell into a kind of ecstasy,
and protruded so much of his body out of
the carriage window, that I expected him
every moment to disappear altogether. To
my surprise, however, when the train drew
up at the station he did not alight, but
murmuring the conventional "Pues, Señores,
echemos un cigarito," "Well, gentlemen,
let us make a little cigar," calmly rolled
up a tube of paper with tobacco, lit it, and
adding, "Vamos al Norte," subsided into
sleep, and, the train aiding, pursued his
journey to the Pyrenees, or Paris, or the
North Pole, or wheresoever else he was
bound. He was clearly a philosopher. He
had seen "El edificio" from afar off. Was
not that enough? I dare say when he
went back to Utrera he talked guide-book
by the page to his friends, and minutely
described all the marvels of the interior of
the palace. I rarely think of the little
Andalusian without recalling Sheridan's
remark to his son Tom, about the coal
pits: "Can't you say you've been down?"

The "Edifice" itself is really and without
exaggeration a bore. The good
pictures have all been taken away to swell the
attractions of the Real Museo at Madrid;
the jolly monks have been driven out and
replaced by a few meagre, atrabilious-
looking, shovel-hatted seminarists (even
these, since the last political earthquake in
Spain, may have disappeared) and it is with
extreme difficulty that you can persuade
the custodes to show you the embroidered
vestments in the sacristy, or the illuminated
manuscripts in the library. The guardians
of every public building in Spain have a
settled conviction that all foreign travellers
are Frenchmen, who, following the notable
example of Marshals Soult and Victor in
the Peninsular War, are bent on stealing
something. Moreover, the inspection of
embroidered copes, dalmatics, and chasubles
soon palls on sight-seers who are not crazy
upon the subject of Ritualism; and as for
being trotted through a vast library when
you have no time to read the books, all I
can say is, that in this respect I prefer a
bookstall in Gray's-inn-lane, with free
access to the "twopenny box," to the
library of the Escorial, to the Bibliothèque
Impériale, the Bodleian, Sion College, and
the library of St. Mark to boot. The
exterior of the Escorial, again, is absolutely
hideous; its grim granite walls, pierced
with innumerable eyelet-holes, with green
shutters, remind the spectator equally of
the Wellington Barracks, Colney Hatch
Lunatic Asylum, and the Great Northern
Hotel at King's-cross. The internal decorations
principally consist of huge, sprawling,
wall-and-ceiling frescoes by Luca Giordano,
surnamed "Luca fa Presto," or Luke in a
hurry. This Luke the Labourer has stuck
innumerable saints, seraphs, and other
celestial personages upon the plaster. He
executed his apotheoses by the yard, for
which he was paid according to a fixed tariff,
a reduction, I suppose, being made for
clouds; and the result of his work is about as
interesting as that of Sir James Thornhill
in the Painted Hall of Greenwich Hospital.
Almost an entire day must be spent if you
wish to see the Escorial thoroughly, and
you grow, at last, fretful and peevish
well-nigh to distraction at the jargon of the
guides, with their monotonous statistics of
the eleven thousand windows of the place,
the two thousand and two feet of its area,
the sixty-three fountains, the twelve cloisters,
the sixteen "patios" or courtyards,
the eighty staircases, and so forth. As for
the relics preserved of that nasty old man
Philip the Second, his greasy hat, his
walking-stick, his shabby elbow-chair, the
board he used to rest his gouty leg upon,
they never moved me. There is something
beautifully and pathetically interesting in
the minutest trifle which remains to remind
us of Mary Queen of Scots. Did you
ever see her watch, in the shape of a
death's head, the works in the brain-pan,
and the dial enamelled on the base of the
jaw? But who would care about a
personal memento of Bloody Queen Mary?
She was our countrywoman, but most of
us wish to forget her bad individuality,
utterly. Should we care anything more
about her Spanish husband?

To complete the lugubrious impressions
which gather round you in this museum of
cruelty, superstition, and madness, you are
taken to an appalling sepulchre
underground: a circular vault, called, absurdly
enough, the "Pantheon," where, on ranges
of marble shelves, are sarcophagi containing
the ashes of all the kings and queens who
have afflicted Spain since the time of
Charles the Fifth. This bonehouse is
rendered all the more hideous by the fact of
its being ornamented in the most garishly
theatrical manner with porphyry and verde