The fame of El Greco[116] has of late years spread and deepened, although the full fascination of his pictures will perhaps never be understood, except by a few. Of his life we have but one or two threadbare details, and this is the more tantalizing because we feel that his life and character were of a strange, alluring interest. Before his coming to Spain, the most interesting fact we learn concerning him is contained in a letter of the artist Julio Clovio, written in November, 1570: “There has arrived in Rome a young Cretan, a disciple of Titian, and, in my opinion, an excellent painter--_parmi raro nella pittura_.” The date of El Greco’s birth is uncertain, but if he was a _giovine_ in 1570, he would hardly have been seventy-seven at the time of his death in 1614. This assertion as to his age was made when the date of his death was given as 1625. It has been conjectured that it arose from an easy confusion between _sesenta_ and _setenta_, and that he was not seventy-seven but sixty-seven; the year of his birth would then be 1547. The exact date of his arrival at Toledo is unknown, but it was about the year 1575; certainly in or before 1577. Toledo had ceased to be the capital and court of Spain, yet still remained the home not only of princes of the Church, but of many men of letters, and the Arabic MS. of “Don Quixote” was discovered in its market-place. Its cathedral was “the richest church in Christendom.” An Italian work published at Venice in 1563 records that “the priests reign triumphant in Toledo--_trionfano_--and give themselves up to good living, and no one reproves them.” The power of the Inquisition was at its height. From the gloom of the Escorial, Philip II.’s narrow, unbending spirit found many echoes in the stern cities of Castille. El Greco lived to see the expulsion of the Moriscos, and the utter decay of the trade and industry of Toledo and other cities. Antonelli’s project to make the Tagus navigable as far as Toledo was rejected scornfully: would not God have made it navigable had it been His will? Yet it was the golden age of Spanish letters, and during El Greco’s sojourn at Toledo the most humorous and broadly human figure of all literature was being elaborated in Cervantes’ brain. El Greco died at Toledo two years before the death of Cervantes and Shakespeare.