While acres of wall and ceiling were being thus painted in fresco, or covered by large and fine pictures, the Escurial gave a ready home to the most minute of the fine arts: illuminators of missals, and painters of miniatures, embroiderers of vestments, and designers of altar-cloths, found their labours appreciated, and their genius called forth, no less than their more aspiring compeers. Fray Andrez de Leon, and Fray Martin de Palencia, enriched the Escurial with exquisite specimens of their skill in the arts of miniature-painting and illuminating; and under the direction of Fray Lorenzo di Monserrate, and Diego Rutiner, the conventual school of embroidery produced frontals and dalmatics, copes, chasubles, and altar-cloths, of rarest beauty and happiest designs. The goldsmiths and silversmiths, too, lacked not encouragement in this greatest of temples. Curious was the skill, and cunning the hand, which fashioned the tower of gold and jasper to contain the Escurial's holiest relique,--a muscle, singed and charred, of St Laurence--and no doubt that skill was nobly rewarded. In 1598, clasping to his breast the veil of Our Lady of Monserrat, in a little alcove hard by the church of the Escurial, died its grim, magnificent founder. He had witnessed the completion of his gigantic designs: palace and convent, there it stood--a monument alike of his piety and his pride, and a proof of the grandeur and resources of the mighty empire over which he ruled. But he appears to have thought with the poet-- "Weighed in the balance, hero-dust Is vile as mortal clay;" for he built no stately mausoleum, merely a common vault, to receive the imperial dead. This omission, in 1617, Philip III. undertook to supply; and Giovanni Battista Crescenzi, an Italian, was selected as the architect. For thirty-four years did he and his successors labour at this royal necropolis, which when finished "became, under the name of the Pantheon, the most splendid chamber of the Escurial."--(Vol. i. p. 412.)