The Convent of San Pascual was founded by Charles III., and the theatre in the town owed its inception to the same monarch. The convent church contains only a few valuable pictures, but it is rich in marble and beautifully carved wood. The convent library possesses many ancient manuscripts, and the convent grounds are famous for their beauty, but the gardens of the royal palace are the crowning glory of Aranjuez. That most entertaining author and indefatigable dispenser of Testaments, George Borrow, travelled in Spain at a time when royalty was battling for its very existence. He found the country dangerous and desolated, and the country homes of its kings fallen into a state of neglect. When he was in La Granja, the palace of San Ildefonso was shut up, and the town which surrounds the patrimony of the Crown of Spain was practically deserted. He had no better luck in Aranjuez. He admits the beauty of the district, but he describes the place as in a state of desolation; he recalls the fact that Ferdinand VII. spent his latter days in its palace surrounded by lovely señoras and Andalusian bull-fighters, and quotes--perhaps with more sentiment than sympathy--the words of Schiller: ‘The happy days in fair Aranjuez Are past and gone.’ ‘Intriguing courtiers no longer crowd its halls,’ he reflects; ‘its spacious circus, where Manchegan bulls once roared in rage and agony, is now closed, and the light tinkling of guitars is no longer heard amidst its groves and gardens.’ One feels as one reads these passages that Borrow was not at his best as a moralist. One prefers him when he is describing in his lively, absorbing manner his personal experiences, and is glad to learn that he disposed of eighty Testaments in desolate Aranjuez, and that he ‘might have sold many more of these Divine books’ if he had remained there a longer period. But we are sorry that Borrow did not see the Palace Gardens in April or May, when the view from the Parterre is one of almost unsurpassed loveliness. The Reina, Isla, and Principe Gardens are furnished with a multitude of bridges, grottoes, fountains, and cascades, bordered and surrounded by an exuberance of plants and flowers from England, France, and the East, all bathed by the waters of the Tagus, and made musical with the notes of myriad birds. ‘The Nightingale that in the Branches sang’ returns in his thousands every spring, and we hear ‘The melodious noise of birds among the spreading branches, and the pleasing fall of water running violently.’ Here are Oriental trees, palms, and the cedars of Lebanon, and interspersed with them are the first elms introduced by Philip II. into Spain from England, which grow magnificently under the combined influence of heat and moisture. The impressionable and responsive Edmondo de Amicis writes of Aranjuez: