antique, with green and yellow Jasper,
with bronze gilt bas-reliefs, and carvings in
variegated marble, and other gimcracks.
There is an old English locution which
laughs at the man who would put a brass
knocker on a pigsty-door. Is such an
architect worthier of ridicule than he who
paints and gilds and tricks up a charnel-
house to the similitude of a playhouse?
As, with a guttering wax-taper in your
hand, you ascend the staircase leading from
this Pantheon into daylight and the world
again, your guide whispers to you that to the
right is another and ghastlier Golgotha,
where the junior scions of Spanish royalty
are buried, or rather where their coffins lie
huddled together, pell-mell. The polite name
for this place, which might excite the
indignation of "graveyard"  Walker (he put a stop
to intramural interments in England, and
got no thanks for his pains) is the
"Pantheon of the Infantes." The common
people call it, with much more brevity and
infinitely more eloquence, "El Pudridero,"
the "rotting place." The best guide-book
you can take with you to this portion of
the Escorial is Jeremy Taylor's sermon on
Death.

Once out of the Escorial, "Luke's iron
crown"—I mean the crown of Luca fa
Presto's ponderous heroes is at once
removed from your brow, on which it has
been pressing with the deadest of weights.
Once rid of the Pantheon, and the stone
staircases, and the slimy cloisters, and you
feel inclined to chirrup, almost. The
gardens are handsome, although shockingly
out of repair; but bleak as is the site, swept
by the almost ceaseless mountain blasts of
the Guadarrama range, it is something to
be rid of Luca fa Presto, and Philip the
Second, and St. Lawrence and his gridiron,
and all their gloomy company. You breathe
again: and down in the village yonder
there is a not bad inn called the Biscaina,
where they cook very decent omelettes, and
where the wine is drinkable. But before
you think of dining you must see King
Pippin's Palace.

This is the "Casita del Principe de
abajo." the "little house of the prince on
the heights," and was built by Juan de
Villanueva, for Charles the Fourth, when
heir- apparent. The only circumstances,
perhaps, under which a king of Spain can
be contemplated with complacency are
those of childhood. In Madrid, I used
always to have a sneaking kindness for
the infantes and infantas—"los niños de
España"—who, with their nurses and
governesses, and their escort of dragoons and
lancers, used to be driven every afternoon
in their gilt coaches drawn by fat mules,
through the Puerta del Sol to the Retiro.
The guard at the Palace of the Gobernacion
used to turn out, the trumpets
would be flourished bravely as "los niños"
went by. Poor little urchins! In the
pictures of Don Diego Velasquez, the niños,
in their little ruffs, and kirtles, and
farthingales, or their little starched doublets
and trunk hose, with their chubby peachy
cheeks, their ruddy lips, and great melting
black eyes look irresistibly fascinating. Ah!
my infantes and infantas of Don Diego, why
did you not remain for aye at the Toddlekins'
stage? why did you grow up to be
tyrants, and madmen, and bigots, and
imbeciles, and no better than you should have
been? This Carlos the Fourth, for instance,
for whom King Pippin's Palace was built,
made an exceedingly bad end of it. He was
the king who was led by the nose by a
worthless wife, and a more worthless
favourite, Godoy, who was called "Prince
of the Peace," and who lived to be quite
forgotten, and to die in a garret in Paris.
Carlos the Fourth was the idiot who allowed
Napoleon to kidnap him. He was the father
of the execrable Ferdinand the Seventh, the
betrayer of his country, the restorer of the
Inquisition, and the embroiderer of
petticoats for the Virgin.

King, or rather Prince Pippin, Charles
the Third's son, is represented in a very
curious style of portraiture, in one of the
apartments of the Escorial itself, a suite
fitted up by his father in anti-monastic style,
that is to say, in the worst kind of Louis
Quinze rococo. The king employed the
famous Goya to make a series of designs to
be afterwards woven on a large scale in
tapestry, and Goya consequently produced
some cartoons which, with their reproductions
in loom-work, may be regarded as the
burlesque antipodes to the immortal
patterns which Rafaelle set the weavers of
Arras. In one of the Goya hangings you
see the juvenile members of the royal family
at their sports, attended by a select number
of young scions of the sangre azul. At
what do you think they are playing? at
bull fighting: a game very popular among
the blackguard little street boys of Madrid
to this day. One boy plays the bull. He
has merely to pop a cloth over his head,
holding two sticks passing through holes in
the cloth at obtuse angles to his head, to
represent the horns of the animal. The
"picadores" are children pickaback, who,