Opposite, in the courtyard, stands the fine bronze statue of the university’s most brilliant alumnus--Luis de Leon. This great man was born at Granada in 1527, and entered the Augustinian Order in 1544. His writings went far to give permanency and purity to the Castilian idiom, which only at that time was coming into use by the learned. Promoted to the chair of theology at Salamanca, his translation into the vernacular of the Song of Solomon excited the suspicions of the Holy Office. He was arrested and kept in confinement at Valladolid during five years, at the end of which time he was released, the charges against him not having been proved to the satisfaction even of the inquisitors. On his return to his chair he received a tumultuous ovation. As he rose, the crowd of students awaited in dead silence an apology, a condemnation of his unjust accusers, some reference at least to the prosecution which had dragged on through five weary years. They were disappointed. Leon had no mind to dwell on his personal affairs. He broke the silence of five years with the simple words, ‘As we were saying yesterday ...’ He died, Provincial of his order, in the year 1591, and was buried in the Convent of San Agustino at Salamanca. On the left side of the square is the old students’ hospital, with a fine effigy of St. Thomas Aquinas over the doorway, and a cornice in the plateresque style. Finer still is the portal of the adjacent Escuelas Menores, also dating from the early sixteenth century. Above the doorway of two arches are displayed the three escutcheons which proclaim the university to be royal, and the triple crown and the heads of St. Peter and St. Paul which proclaim it pontifical. These emblems appear amidst a profusion of detail, in which the Gothic and plateresque styles seem to have been assimilated. Returning to the principal façade, we find the archives on the ground floor. Opening out of the inner _patio_ may be seen the lecture-room of Louis de Leon. His ashes now repose in the chapel once adorned by Fernando Gallego, but ‘restored’ in the eighteenth century. The coloured stones and marbles used in the reconstruction are not without a certain pleasing effect. Passing up the noble staircase, with its banisters formed of dancing figures and foliage and superb artesonado ceiling, we reach the handsome library. This contains many treasures, among them forty Greek codices, as many Latin, the illuminated MS. of ‘famous and virtuous women,’ written by Alvaro de Luna, and a fifteenth-century Bible, richly illuminated. The Sala del Claustro is shown, outside which the student about to contest a thesis was obliged to remain for twenty-four hours to consider his subject at leisure.