Before it towers
the great chain of mountains separating Old and New Castile. Behind it
the chilled winds sweep down to the Madrid plateau, over rocky hillocks
and involved ravines,--a scene in which probably no man ever took
pleasure except the royal recluse who chose it for his home.
John Baptist of Toledo laid the corner-stone on an April day of 1563,
and in the autumn of 1584 John of Herrera looked upon the finished work,
so vast and so gloomy that it lay like an incubus upon the breast of
earth. It is a parallelogram measuring from north to south seven hundred
and forty-four feet, and five hundred and eighty feet from east to west.
It is built, by order of the fantastic bigot, in the form of St.
Lawrence's gridiron, the courts representing the interstices of the
bars, and the towers at the corners sticking helpless in the air like
the legs of the supine implement. It is composed of a clean gray
granite, chiefly in the Doric order, with a severity of facade that
degenerates into poverty, and defrauds the building of the effect its
great bulk merits. The sheer monotonous walls are pierced with eleven
thousand windows, which, though really large enough for the rooms, seem
on that stupendous surface to shrink into musketry loopholes. In the
centre of the parallelogram stands the great church, surmounted by its
soaring dome. All around the principal building is stretched a
circumscribing line of convents, in the same style of doleful
yellowish-gray uniformity, so endless in extent that the inmates might
easily despair of any world beyond them.
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