This
Interesting Experiment, Which Is So Common In Our Favored Land, Could
Never Be Tried In Toledo, As I Believe
There is only one turnout in the
city, a minute omnibus with striped linen hangings at the sides, driven
by
A young Castilian whose love of money is the root of much discussion
when you pay his bill. It is a most remarkable establishment. The horses
can cheerfully do their mile in fifteen or twenty minutes, but they make
more row about it than a high-pressure Mississippi steamer; and the
crazy little trap is noisier in proportion to its size than anything I
have ever seen, except perhaps an Indiana tree-toad. If you make an
excursion outside the walls, the omnibus, noise and all, is inevitable;
let it come. But inside the city you must walk; the slower the better,
for every door is a study.
It is hard to conceive that this was once a great capital with a
population of two hundred thousand souls. You can easily walk from one
end of the city to the other in less than half an hour, and the houses
that remain seem comfortably filled by eighteen thousand inhabitants.
But in this narrow space once swarmed that enormous and busy multitude.
The city was walled about by powerful stone ramparts, which yet stand in
all their massy perfection. So there could have been no suburbs. This
great aggregation of humanity lived and toiled on the crests and in the
wrinkles of the seven hills we see to-day. How important were the
industries of the earlier days we can guess from the single fact that
John of Padilla, when he rose in defence of municipal liberty in the
time of Charles V., drew in one day from the teeming workshops twenty
thousand fighting men. He met the usual fate of all Spanish patriots,
shameful and cruel death. His palace was razed to the ground. Successive
governments, in shifting fever-fits of liberalism and absolutism, have
set up and pulled down his statue. But his memory is loved and honored,
and the example of this noblest of the comuneros impresses powerfully
to-day the ardent young minds of the new Spain.
Your first walk is of course to the Cathedral, the Primate Church of the
kingdom. Besides its ecclesiastical importance, it is well worthy of
notice in itself. It is one of the purest specimens of Gothic
architecture in existence, and is kept in an admirable state of
preservation. Its situation is not the most favorable. It is approached
by a network of descending streets, all narrow and winding, as streets
were always built under the intelligent rule of the Moors. They
preferred to be cool in summer and sheltered in winter, rather than to
lay out great deserts of boulevards, the haunts of sunstroke and
pneumonia. The site of the Cathedral was chosen from strategic reasons
by St. Eugene, who built there his first Episcopal Church. The Moors
made a mosque of it when they conquered Castile, and the fastidious
piety of St. Ferdinand would not permit him to worship in a shrine thus
profaned.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 87 of 132
Words from 44360 to 44884
of 67759
