We visited the Escorial some distance from Madrid. Philip II. is buried there. Its situation is wild and desolate—a vast expanse of undulations, scarcely to be called mountainous, except in the distance, where snow-streaked sierras send cutting blasts over the slate roofs and against the grey stone walls. The building itself looks like a manufactory, at best like spacious barracks; one may think it something between a prison and a convent, or rather a combination of the two; at any rate its cold, stern, repulsive exterior is a fair type of the builder’s character and influence. The only objects of much interest, and they are in truth most melancholy, one finds in the monkish apartments, the monastic chapel, and the costly sepulchre of the founder and his family. A long and narrow room is shown with brick floor and leathern chairs, where he dined. Next to it is another, only separated by folding doors, from which, when open, the despot borrowed the light by which he wrote his despatches. In this room is a plain oak table, with three brass ink bottles on one side, and a velvet writing-case in the middle; these, with the leather-bottomed chair on which he sat, are carefully preserved. From this room you pass into a third, low and dark, a mere cell, whence through an opening in the wall, the altar of the monastery chapel may be seen; there he spent his last hours, after being, like his prototype Herod, smitten by an angel of the Lord, and eaten up of worms; no death could be more horrible. That chapel is an enormous marble building, most costly, most dreary, and into one corner of the _coro_ he would sometimes steal, to perform his devotions with the Jeronymite brotherhood. The sepulchre under the high altar is reached by a slippery marble staircase; and round the sides of the vault are placed sarcophagi, one above another; Charles V. occupies the topmost position, Philip being placed under his father. The dismalness of the spot is unrelieved by any emblem or suggestion of Christian hope: not even such a ray falls over it as that which lighted up the mind of the heathen Cicero, when he spoke of meeting in the future life an assembly of noble souls.