the stern home of revolt, the nest of mailed warriors and hardy artisans, so hard and quarrelsome that not even their loves furnish us with a soft legend, nor their literature a witching profile, or any hint of seductive grace in their womanhood. [Illustration: THE CATHEDRAL TOWER] CHAPTER VII _Domenico Theotocopulos_ El Greco There is but one great painter permanently and almost exclusively associated with Toledo, _El Greco_. All the notable pictures of the town are his, and so vast is his work here, that the Toledan churches possess at least fifty pictures of his, a dozen of which are nothing less than masterpieces, and the rest the work of a master in weaker and more erratic moments. Masters are so rare in the history of this world that one would gladly know something of this tardily recognised great one; learn the secret of his preposterous defects in the second stage of his development, and the no less enigmatic secret of his occasional reach to supreme perfection. How came the man who could paint the glorious under picture of the Burial of Count Orgaz (see illustration), to draw and paint the inconceivable picture of St John the Baptist in the _hospital de Afuera_? How, in fact, rose the absurd legend of his madness, since no details of the man's life has reached us on which to base such an idea? Théophile Gautier, with lamentable flippancy, gives echo in France to the ill-natured supposition of Palomino, the least trustworthy of guides. Nearly every fact given by Palomino concerning _El Greco_ is false. He states the painter's age, though no mortal being, contemporary of _El Greco_, or researcher of our own times, has the faintest ground for any such statement. The registrar of his death, which a Spanish painter, an impassioned student of all that concerns _El Greco_, has seen, proves that the artist's age was uncertain, since nobody about him knew the date of his birth. Furthermore, Palomino tells us triumphantly that _El Greco_ was buried in the parish of San Bartolomé, "and instead of a slab they placed a railing over his grave to indicate that nobody else should be buried there." The church fell down years afterwards, he assures us, and the place of _El Greco's_ burial was no longer known. This is all mere supposition, just as Palomino's statement of _El Greco's_ age, seventy-seven, and more innocent in the way of loose statements than his information that Theotocopulos went mad with rage from hearing himself compared with Titian, and purposely distorted his work to extinguish a similarity that did him honour. Such is the flimsy tale so genial and witty a writer as Gautier lightly spreads.