Of the four Escuelas Mayores (High Schools)--San Bartolomé, del Arzobispo, Cuenca, and Oviedo--only the two first remain. These colleges bore the same relation to the Escuelas Menores that our Staff College does to Sandhurst. Here graduates were prepared for the highest posts in church and state. The College of San Bartolomé was founded in 1401 by Bishop de Anaya, whose sons were educated within its walls, and transferred to the present site sixteen years later. Vergara says that it produced seven cardinals, eighteen archbishops, seventy bishops, and innumerable judges and councillors of state. Like so many other similar institutions, originally intended for the poor and scholarly, the college soon became the preserve of the rich and aristocratic. The quarterings on the applicant’s shield were more carefully examined than his pretensions to scholarship, and when Carlos III. undertook to reform the college, it had earned the name of a hot-bed of vice. Its inward reformation corresponded with its material restoration. Little or nothing remains of the original structure. A spacious flight of steps leads up to the handsome portico in the Grecian style, with its four Corinthian columns and triangular pediment. The whole building is simple and massive, and crowned by a balustrade, in the centre of which are displayed the arms of the Anayas; the main façade the chapel with a heavy dome and Churrigueresque entrance. The inner court or _patio_ is surrounded by a double gallery, the lower formed by sixteen Doric columns, the upper by as many Ionic. The magnificent staircase, dividing after the first flight into two branches, with its arches, Corinthian columns, and windows all in stone, surpasses any similar feat of architecture in Spain. In the western part of the city, where abundant evidence yet remains of the frightful destruction wrought by the French in Wellington’s day, stands the interesting Colegio del Arzobispo, better known as the Colegio de los Irlandeses. Founded by Alfonso de Fonseca, successively Archbishop of Santiago and Toledo, it dates from the year 1521. The portal is in the classic style, with eight Ionic columns, a medallion of Santiago, and the archiepiscopal escutcheon; the adjoining façade is of the late Gothic. Above it rises the square cupola of the chapel designed by Pedro de Ibarra, and containing a retablo which ranks one of Berruguete’s finest works. The subjects of the eight panels of which it is composed are: the Ascension, Baptism, Flight into Egypt, the Adoration of the Shepherds, the Presentation in the Temple, the Finding of Moses, the Descent of the Holy Ghost, and Ananias and Sapphira. The whole was executed in less than eighteen months. Under a simple marble slab rests the body of Archbishop de Fonseca. The galleries of the _patio_ are formed by fluted columns and adorned with the heads of warriors very skilfully executed.