The _Ochavo_ is like everything here, an impressive chamber, the home of vast treasure. It is a monument of bronze and marble, containing massive silver coffins wonderfully wrought for the bones of St Leocadia and St Eugenius, statues of silver and ivory, and priceless reliquaries. Behind are guarded the church vestments. Nowhere are such embroideries and brocades to be seen. The hundred altar-pieces are works of art to set the mouth of the collector awatering. The older they are the more lovely, and beside the early Gothic brocade-embroidery, the finest effort of the last century seems poor and vulgar, though seen apart would cause the beholder to exclaim at its loveliness. Whence did these rude Goths obtain their secret of such exquisite work? and how has it died from amongst us? Were the sacristan willing, and human nature capable of such a prolonged effort of admiration, one might spend days among these gold and silver embroidered brocades, and complacently dream of impossible times. But when the sacristan has shown you a dozen chasubles and a dozen altar-pieces, he thinks it quite enough--and so do you, wearied from excess of strain upon admiration and ravenous envy. The beautiful and massive tower which lends majesty to an exterior not nearly so impressive as the interior of the Cathedral, was begun by Rodrigo Alfonso in 1380, but the work went on very slowly until the Archbishop Contreras put it into the hands of the architect, Alvar Gomez, who finished it (1440). There have been changes since, especially in 1660, when the capital was burnt and rebuilt. It is worth while to ascend the interminable stairs to the belfry, not to marvel at the largest bell, I believe, of the world, whose terrible note reaches as far as Madrid, but to revel in the view. You seem to look down upon the earth from Alpine heights. Below, through incredible depths of space, flows the Tagus, with its broad horse-shoe curve that makes almost an island of the town, and with charming little breaks in joyous verdure and soft little dashes of blue shade and white mist, the sombre and austere hills of Toledo make an upper and more violent rampart against the world beyond. Such is the sense of imprisonment here, that the eye instinctively seeks, as a chance of escape, the long white way of Madrid. It is good to breathe a moment in so exalted an atmosphere, to behold so vast and wonderful a scene, in which all remembrance of human miseries vanishes, and our very joys drop into relative significance. Nature has nowhere else attained a note of beauty harsher, more intense, more indifferently sublime. Elsewhere you feel that an effort has been made to captivate you, a deliberate combination of effects to win your admiration. Not so here. The Moors never succeeded, during their long sovereignty, in stamping the place with their voluptuous charm, as they did in Granada, Cordova, and Valencia. They left it as they found it,