Tintoretto is rather injured at the
Museo by the number and importance of his pictures left in this monkish
twilight; among them is a lovely Esther, and a masterly Presentation of
Christ to the People. Plenty of Giordanos and Bassanos and one or two
by El Greco, with his weird plague-stricken faces, all chalk and
charcoal. A sense of duty will take you into the crypt where the dead
kings are sleeping in brass. This mausoleum, ordered by the great
Charles, was slow in finishing. All of his line had a hand in it down to
Philip IV., who completed it and gathered in the poor relics of royal
mortality from many graves. The key of the vault is the stone where the
priest stands when he elevates the Host in the temple above. The vault
is a graceful octagon about forty feet high, with nearly the same
diameter; the flickering light of your torches shows twenty-six
sarcophagi, some occupied and some empty, filling the niches of the
polished marble. On the right sleep the sovereigns, on the left their
consorts. There is a coffin for Dona Isabel de Bourbon among the kings,
and one for her amiable and lady-like husband among the queens. They
were not lovely in their lives, and in their deaths they shall be
divided. The quaint old church-mouse who showed me the crypt called my
attention to the coffin where Maria Louisa, wife of Charles IV.,--the
lady who so gallantly bestrides her war-horse, in the uniform of a
colonel, in Goya's picture,--coming down those slippery steps with the
sure footing of feverish insanity, during a severe illness, scratched
_Luisa_ with the point of her scissors and marked the sarcophagus for
her own.
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