The Vault Is A Graceful Octagon About Forty Feet High, With Nearly The Same Diameter; The Flickering Light Of Your Torches Shows Twenty-Six Sarcophagi, Some Occupied And Some Empty, Filling The Niches Of The Polished Marble.

On the right sleep the sovereigns, on the left their consorts.

There is a coffin for Dona Isabel de Bourbon among the kings, and one for her amiable and lady-like husband among the queens. They were not lovely in their lives, and in their deaths they shall be divided. The quaint old church-mouse who showed me the crypt called my attention to the coffin where Maria Louisa, wife of Charles IV., - the lady who so gallantly bestrides her war-horse, in the uniform of a colonel, in Goya's picture, - coming down those slippery steps with the sure footing of feverish insanity, during a severe illness, scratched Luisa with the point of her scissors and marked the sarcophagus for her own. All there was good of her is interred with her bones. Her frailties live on in scandalized history.

Twice, it is said, the coffin of the emperor has been opened by curious hands, - by Philip IV., who found the corpse of his great ancestor intact, and observed to the courtier at his elbow, "An honest body, Don Luis!" and again by the Ministers of State and Fomento in the spring of 1870, who started back aghast when the coffin-lid was lifted and disclosed the grim face of the Burgess of Ghent, just as Titian painted him, - the keen, bold face of a world-stealer.

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