Time, with its chances and changes, has dealt rudely with this fair home of the monarch and the monk. Yuste was sacked in 1809 by the French invader; and in later years, the Spanish reformer has annihilated the race of picturesque drones, who, for a while, re-occupied, and might have repaired the ruins of their pleasant hive. Of the two cloisters, the greater is choked with the rubbish of its fallen upper story, its richly-carved capitals peeping here and there from the soil and wild shrubs. Two sides of the smaller and older cloister still stands, with tottering blackened walls, and rotting floors and ceilings. The strong, granite-vaulted church is a hollow shell; the fine wood-work of its stalls has been partly used for fuel, partly carried off to the parish church of Quacos; and the beautiful blue and yellow tiles which lined the chancel are fast dropping from the walls. In the emperor's dwelling, the lower chambers are turned into a magazine of firewood, and in the rooms above, where he lived and died, maize and olives are garnered, and the silkworm winds its cocoon in dust and darkness. But the lovely face of nature, the hill, the forest, and the field, the generous soil and the genial sky, remain with charms unchanged, to testify how well the imperial eagle chose the nest wherein to fold his wearied wings. From the balcony of Charles's cabinet the eye ranges over a foreground of rounded knolls, clad in walnut and chestnut, in which the mountain dies gently away into the broad bosom of the Vera. Not a building is in sight, but a summer-house, peering above mulberry tops, at the lower side of the garden, and a hermitage of Our Lady of Solitude, about a mile distant, hung upon a rocky height, that swells like an isle out of the sea of forest. Immediately below the windows the garden slopes gently to the sun, shaded here and there with the massive foliage of the fig, or feathery almond boughs, and breathing perfume from tall orange-trees, cuttings of which some monks, themselves transplanted, vainly strove to keep alive at the bleak Escorial. And beyond the west wall, filling all the wide space in front of the gates of the convent and the palace, rises the noble shade of the great walnut-tree, _el nogal grande_, of Yuste--a forest king, which has seen the hermit's cell rise into a royal convent, and sink into a ruin; which has seen the beginning and the end of the Spanish order of Jerome, and the Spanish dynasty of Austria.