He Bound The Two
Obligations In One, And Added A Third Destination To The Enormous Pile
He Contemplated.
It should be a palace as well as a monastery and a
royal charnel-house.
He chose the most appropriate spot in Spain for the
erection of the most cheerless monument in existence. He had fixed his
capital at Madrid because it was the dreariest town in Spain, and to
envelop himself in a still profounder desolation, he built the Escorial
out of sight of the city, on a bleak, bare hillside, swept by the
glacial gales of the Guadarrama, parched by the vertical suns of summer,
and cursed at all seasons with the curse of barrenness. Before it towers
the great chain of mountains separating Old and New Castile. Behind it
the chilled winds sweep down to the Madrid plateau, over rocky hillocks
and involved ravines, - a scene in which probably no man ever took
pleasure except the royal recluse who chose it for his home.
John Baptist of Toledo laid the corner-stone on an April day of 1563,
and in the autumn of 1584 John of Herrera looked upon the finished work,
so vast and so gloomy that it lay like an incubus upon the breast of
earth. It is a parallelogram measuring from north to south seven hundred
and forty-four feet, and five hundred and eighty feet from east to west.
It is built, by order of the fantastic bigot, in the form of St.
Lawrence's gridiron, the courts representing the interstices of the
bars, and the towers at the corners sticking helpless in the air like
the legs of the supine implement.
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