one of the most beautiful portraits El Greco ever painted. But all your admiration is claimed by Berruguete's monument before the altar. As the work of an old and dying man, it confounds minute and modern talent. It has the virility, the freshness, the superb strength of youth; it has the serenity, the stillness, the awful majesty of death. Mount the steps beside this marble tomb, and you will look on such a picture of death in all its restful sublimity as the hand, the imagination of man have rarely seized. Nothing like that old man's head under the mitre has Berruguete himself ever done. It is the supreme attainment of genius on the eve of eternal night, the culmination of a magnificent art, when the great strong hand is about to lay down the chisel forever, and gathers in a supreme moment all that is best in a life's work, to give it a noble ending. You should examine all the splendid details, the large gracious statues at either corner, the shields, the eagles, the urns and masterly mouldings, before looking at the dead cardinal's visage, for after that you will have no mind left for any emotion but awe. Here so cheap a thing as praise melts into stupefied silence. The aged sculptor began this monument in 1559 and finished it in 1561, the year of his death, and it was his sons who received the payment due to him, 993,764 maravedis. It seems extraordinary that anyone should dare to put a price on such work, or even offer vulgar coin for it. There are things that lie without the radius of commerce and competition, and this is surely one of them. One is almost content to think that Berruguete was never actually paid for such an inspiration, but dropped into immortality before the revolting 993,764 maravedis unworthily touched a hand so honoured. CHAPTER XI _Bridges and Gates of Toledo_