We get a glimpse here of a strangely individual personality, reserved and proud, conscious of his destiny, working it out in a haughty exclusiveness; wrapt up in high thoughts and cultivating in the retirement of private life a rare refinement. In Toledo, then the citadel of the Catholic Faith, so dominated by the dignitaries of the Church that Philip II, who brooked no rivalry of power, was forced to transfer his Court thence to Madrid, El Greco preserved the integrity of his artistic faith and, by separating himself from outside influences, maintained the independent sovereignty of his own ideals. * * * * * El Greco left a _View of Toledo_; a portrait, one would rather call it, of a city’s appearance and her soul; a highly interpretative vision of the impression of Toledo’s soul upon the spiritual imagination of the artist. The view is from the hill beneath which the present railroad station lies, and looks across the broken ground to the ravine of the Tagus. In the middle distance toward the left it is spanned by the wide arch and its narrower sister of the Alcántara bridge. Thence the line of the city walls, interrupted by their Moorish towers, mount the citadel hill to the group of buildings that crown the summit. The Alcázar and the north tower of the cathedral stand conspicuously against a sky, tumultuous with emotion and lit with large aspiring clouds. These, like the architecture, catch the sharpest light, which elsewhere is distributed in masses of lower tone; a union of quiet illumination and of flashing sword-like brands of light, characteristic of so many of the artist’s compositions, so suggestive of passionate inspiration. How different from Venice of his youth, this rock-rooted fortress city of the artist’s adoption! No less proudly aloof, but sternly and strenuously exalted; straitened within tortuous limits; an apex once of Moorish power and luxury, now of Catholic dominion and sumptuous ecclesiastical ceremony; its dignitaries men of high and commanding personality, its Cathedral famous throughout Spain as Toledo the Rich! The chivalric fervor bred upon countless battlefields, glowed here in an intense heat of religious mysticism. Her hidalgos, “sons of somebody,” were among the proudest of their class, self-contained, austere, yet fired with religious ecstasy. Toledo was at that time the soul of Catholicism and of the high-bred Chivalry of Castile.