The court life shifts from the green Sierras of Cordoba to the old city of Toledo. Again we are in the corn-bearing plains, the outlines of the domes, pinnacles, and turrets of the Alcazar before us gay and jocund with the security of two hundred years of Gothic rule. What footsteps have echoed through those courts! What regal presences haunt them! Iberian, Roman, and Gothic; Recaredo, Wamba, Witica, and comely Roderich; to be followed by Moors, and Castilian kings; El Caballero, El Emplazado, El Valente, El Impotente; a red haired bastard of Trastamare succeeding his brother Don Pedro el Cruel, a swaggering Alfonso, Velasque’s, Philip, the staid dowager-queen Berenguela, fair Isabel the Catholic, the widow of Philip the Fourth, the mother of Charles el Soco, Johana el Loca, not to forget the Cid, first Christian alcaide and governor; a palace in old times marking the utmost limits of the known world, beyond which the East looked into the hyperborean darkness of the West; the geographical centre of all Spain--supremely regal, its foundations laid in legend, and its ramparts raised in the glamour of Oriental song; a refuge from Moorish invasion for the defenceless Goth, and the superb residence of later kings. In a hollow beneath rise the towers of the cathedral, and the outline of many ancient synagogues, for the Jews were always powerful in Toledo--El Transito and El Blanco are the principal ones, and hospitals for the chosen race. If Toledo was the Gothic capital, it was also long before known under the name of “Toledoth,” where the Jews came in great numbers after the sack of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar. “The Jews fled to Tarshish,” says the Bible, and Tarshish is the scriptural name for Southern Spain. Other churches and oratories there were, for the Goths were a pious people, also the house of Wamba over the Tagus, and the mystic tower of Hercules, rising on a rock, the entrance guarded by an inscription setting forth “that whenever a king passes the threshold, the empire of Spain shall fall”; a warning much respected by the Gothic kings--Wamba, Ervig, Eric, and Witica, who each in turn ordered fresh locks and chains to be added to make it fast. Baths there were also, and on the hills summer houses and _huertas_ moistened by fountains and streams, the dark Tagus making, as it were, a defence and barrier about the walls.