robed in camel's hair, and instead of graceful, superfluous locks, Paul wore a mock crown of laurel. He was not without a certain grim humour King Wamba, you perceive, and one would like to have seen his Gothic visage as his glance fell upon the laurel crown. Not benignant of a surety, possibly sardonic. But it is not in connection with Count Paul that Wamba's name reaches us to-day and like that of the fatal Rodrigo, is permanently attached to Toledo. Forgotten the long list of Gothic sovereigns, forgotten the councils they presided over, the battles they lost and won, their achievements, follies and virtues, their epistolary flowers of speech and decrees. Only Wamba and Rodrigo remain, one a historic fact, the other vaguely and unveraciously defined through legend and romance. As I have said, coming up from the station, the traveller is greeted upon the dusty curving road by the noseless statue of King Wamba, who built upon the Roman remains a magnificent wall round the city, raised ramparts, towers, and chapels, and for eight years was the untiring benefactor of the city and the people, till treachery rewarded his splendid services by deposition in the hour of illness and condemned him to claustral reclusion. In his days, the Bridge of Alcántara still existed with its marvellous Roman arch, one of the most finished and graceful Roman monuments of Spain. For the Goths had the virtue not to destroy any of the Roman remains, though they were incapable of profiting by what they found. They it was who, at Wamba's orders, built the walls and palaces of Toledo, and gave [Illustration: PUENTE DE ALCANTARA.] the city its definite note of architecture, a note the Moors were careful not to efface, all in adding their own ineffaceable stamp, for the Moors were great artists and had the secret of utilising what they influenced. If the Spanish Goths began by modelling their architecture on the Roman remains in their capacity of imitators and not inventors, the Moors, inventors and assimilators, forced the Goths to modify their style by the famous mudejar order. Violence must be a rudimentary instinct of humanity, since the milder and less florid mudejar remains a single feature in Spanish architecture, while the rough Goths have the secret of impressing their individuality on all the entire Peninsula, and so with their flowers of speech, vapid, empty, and void of sincerity which to this day have entered the language of the country, unaltered by the march of centuries, ornate and unintelligent, untouched by modern civilisation, of which the Spaniards take no heed. The ruins of this dead Gothic art are best studied at Toledo. Here you have it purest, the fourth century style with its coarse and pointed leafage, its laboured workmanship, its ornamentation, symbols, and figurative caprices, then so new and bold, and which are never repeated in the Arabic or Byzantine architecture later.