The purest mudejar steeple of Toledo is that of San Roman. This Moorish steeple, with its arcaded windows and ingenious brickwork, was erected by the famous Esteban de Illan, chief of the Toledos. Formerly the church was a mosque remodelled from the original Gothic chapel, as the remains of Arabic inscriptions indicate. After the Conquest it was refashioned again into a Christian temple, and has since undergone frequent restoration. Here St Ildefonso, after St Leocadia, the patron of Toledo, was baptised in remoter centuries. In the sixteenth century the _plateresca_ capilla major was built. Four wide arches, the two in front of the central nave open, and the others wrought into the lateral walls, with their graceful pillars and reliefs are extremely effective, and are regarded, with the florid sculpture and half-orange cupola, as constituting one of the finest specimens of plateresca architecture of Toledo. The light, however, is imperfect for full inspection. The retablo belongs to the same debased form of renaissance, an excess in sculpture, legends in relief and medallion, every kind of architectural fancy a combination of Gothic and classic could suggest. Nearly all evidence of its earlier form has vanished, but for a defaced Arabian inscription and a few horse-shoe arches, and a line of blocked arcades with the cusped arches above, bold and large, while a simple ceiling covers the primitive artesonado. In a little chapel on the Epistle side, are a few forsaken specimens of old Spanish painting, before it blossomed out into our European school. They are stiff and dull enough, and their subject the conventional scenes from the New Testament, but interesting as a development of Spanish art. [Illustration: SANTIAGO, TOLEDO] From the Moorish windows of its tower the flag of Castille waved in 1166, while the little king downstairs, in the safe keeping of the mighty Illans was proclaimed, _Toledo, Toledo, Toledo por el rey Don Alonso VIII._, and the town, in one of its customary phases of turbulent revolt, was divided between the followers of the great families of the Illans, the Laras, and the Castros. The tower is of plain reddish-brown stone, the brick-work rough and unmoulded of a supremely singular and distinguished effect, in perfect keeping with the rude, strange aspect of the city. Among the smaller mudejar steeples is a good example in that of Santa Magdalena. This is rougher and simpler than the rest. It has only two arched windows above, while the lower part is perfectly plain and solid. The bells hang in the window, adding thus to the picturesque rudeness of the general effect, so unfamiliar to the northern eye, so quaintly barbaric, so distinguished in its freedom from the curse of modern banality or vulgarity. [Illustration: SANTO PABLO]