The Dignified Consideration Of The Custodian Who Showed Us Through The Apartments Seemed To Have Adapted To Our Station A Manner Left Over From The Infrequent Presence Of Royalty; As I Have Said, The Young King Of Spain Does Not Like Coming To The Escorial.

I do not know why any one comes there, and I search my consciousness in vain for a better reason than the feeling that I must come, or would be sorrier if I did not than if I did.

The worthy Howell does not commit himself to any expression of rejoicing or regretting in having done the Escorial. But the good Theophile Gautier, who visited the place more than two hundred years after, owns frankly that he is "excessively embarrassed in giving his opinion" of it. "So many people," he says, "serious and well-conditioned, who, I prefer to think, have never seen it, have spoken of it as a _chef d'oeuvre,_ and a supreme effort of the human spirit, so that I should have the air, poor devil of a _facilletoniste errant,_ of wishing to play the original and taking pleasure in my contrary-mindedness; but still in my soul and conscience I cannot help finding the Escorial the most tiresome and the most stupid monument that could be imagined, for the mortification of his fellow-beings, by a morose monk and a suspicious tyrant. I know very well that the Escorial had a serious and religious aim; but gravity is not dryness, melancholy is not marasm, meditation is not ennui, and beauty of forms can always be happily wedded to elevation of ideas." This is the Frenchman's language as he goes into the Escorial; he does not cheer up as he passes through the place, and when he comes out he has to say:

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