The provincial museums of Spain are, as a rule, disappointing, but the Burgos collection, housed in the Puerta Santa Maria, is enriched by the spoils of numerous ancient churches and suppressed convents. The alabaster effigy of Don Juan de Padilla, believed to be by Gil de Siloe, is one of the noblest sepulchral monuments in the kingdom. It was brought here from the ruined monastery of Fres del Val, where the knight was interred in 1491, having met his death at the age of twenty years, before the walls of Granada. He is shown kneeling in an attitude of prayer, beside a prie-Dieu. The face is beautiful and expressive, and probably a portrait. An ample robe of extraordinary richness reveals the shirt of mail, the cuirass, and the plate armour worn by the young warrior. The style reminds one of the statues of Don Juan II. and Prince Alfonso in the Cartuja, and reflects the greatest credit on Spanish sculpture. Hardly less beautiful is the tomb itself, decorated with shields upheld by angels, and an inscription recording the age of the deceased. In the museum is also a very curious and interesting altar-front from the convent of Santo Domingo de Silos, dating from the eleventh century. It is of bronze, with figures of saints in coloured enamels, in a bastard Byzantine style. The Moorish ivory casket from the same monastery and of the same century is profoundly interesting, as exhibiting in relief the Persian theory of the origin of good and evil, like the basin from Medina Az Zahara, preserved in the National Museum of Archæology. The Byzantine reliefs of saints on one side of the casket were evidently carved by the Christians when they became the possessors. Few small provincial collections contain more important antiquities than the Museum of Burgos. III SALAMANCA ‘Sword never blunted pen,’ says a Spanish proverb, ‘nor pen sword.’ The history of Salamanca illustrated this truth. Its people were doughty warriors and learned scholars. The name of Salamanca was feared by Moor and Portuguese, as much as it was respected in all the halls of learning of the mediæval world. The seat of a university which all but successfully competed for pre-eminence with Oxford and Paris, it was at the same time the permanent camp of as fierce a race of fighting men as ever marched beneath the banners of Spain. The pen has made the city famous in every land, but it was by her sword that she came to be better known in her own country. Decayed and ruined, she has yet made herself illustrious in the two great fields of human activity, and has a twofold claim on the respect and interest of men of every European tongue.