royal apartments which seem the natural end of your visit. Of these
something better can be said than that they are no worse than most other
royal apartments; our guide led us to them through many granite courts
and corridors where we left groups of unguided Americans still maddening
over their Baedekers; and we found them hung with pleasing tapestries,
some after such designs of Goya's as one finds in the basement of the
Prado. The furniture was in certain rooms cheerily upholstered in
crimson and salmon without sense of color, but as if seeking relief from
the gray of the church; and there are battle-pieces on the walls, fights
between Moors and Christians, which interested me. The dignified
consideration of the custodian who showed us through the apartments
seemed to have adapted to our station a manner left over from the
infrequent presence of royalty; as I have said, the young king of Spain
does not like coming to the Escorial.

I do not know why any one comes there, and I search my consciousness in
vain for a better reason than the feeling that I must come, or would be
sorrier if I did not than if I did. The worthy Howell does not commit
himself to any expression of rejoicing or regretting in having done the
Escorial. But the good Theophile Gautier, who visited the place more
than two hundred years after, owns frankly that he is "excessively
embarrassed in giving his opinion" of it. "So many people," he says,
"serious and well-conditioned, who, I prefer to think, have never seen
it, have spoken of it as a _chef d'oeuvre,_ and a supreme effort of the
human spirit, so that I should have the air, poor devil of a
_facilletoniste errant,_ of wishing to play the original and taking
pleasure in my contrary-mindedness; but still in my soul and conscience
I cannot help finding the Escorial the most tiresome and the most stupid
monument that could be imagined, for the mortification of his
fellow-beings, by a morose monk and a suspicious tyrant. I know very