These early struggles past, the Jeromites of Yuste grew and prospered. Gifts and bequests were the chief events in their peaceful annals. They became patrons of chapelries and hermitages; they made them orchards. and olive groves; and their corn and wine increased. The hostel, dispensary, and other offices of their convent, were patterns of monastic comfort and order; and in due time they built a new church, a simple, solid, and spacious structure, in the pointed style. A few years before the emperor came to dwell amongst them, they had added to their small antique cloister a new quadrangle of stately proportions, and of the elegant classical architecture which Berruguete had recently introduced into Castille.

Although more remarkable for the natural beauty which smiled around its walls, than for any growth of spiritual grace within them, Yuste did not fail to boast of its worthies. Early in the sixteenth century one of its sons, Fray Pedro de Bejar, was chosen general of the order, and was remarkable for the vigour of his administration and the boldness and efficacy of his reforms. The prior Geronimo de Plasencia, a scion of the great house of Zuñiga, was cited as a model of austere and active holiness. The lay brother Melchor de Yepes, after twice deserting the convent to become a soldier, being crippled in felling a huge chestnut-tree in the forest, became for the remainder of his days a pattern of bed-ridden patience and piety. Fray Juan de Xeres, an old soldier of the great captain, was distinguished by the gift of second sight, and was nursed upon his deathbed by the eleven thousand virgins. Still more favoured was Fray Rodrigo de Caceres, for the blessed Mary herself, in answer to his repeated prayers, came down in visible beauty and glory, and received his spirit on the eve of the feast of her assumption. The pulpit popularity

of the prior, Diego de San Geronimo, a son of the old Castillian line of Tovar, was long remembered in the Vera, in the names of a road leading to Garganta la Olla, and of a bridge near Xaraiz, constructed, when he grew old and infirm, by the people of these places, to smooth the path of their favourite preacher to their village pulpits.'

The fraternity now numbered amongst its members a certain Fray Alonso Mudarra, who had been in the world a man of rank, and employed in the civil service of the emperor. Fray Hernando de Corral was the man of letters of the band; and it was perhaps partly on account of this strange taste, that those who did not think him a saint considered him a fool. The tallest and brawniest of the brotherhood, his great strength was equalled by his love of using it; and whenever there was any hard or rough work to be done, he took it as an affront if he was not called to do it. Amongst his other eccentricities, were noted his not returning to bed after early matins, but roaming through the cloisters, praying aloud, and telling his beads; his buying, begging, and reading every book that came in his way; and the want of due regard for the refectory-cheer, which he sometimes evinced by dividing amongst beggars at the gate the entire contents of the conventual larder. He was also particularly fond of the choral service, and careful in compelling the attendance of his brethren; and, observing that the vicar chose frequently to absent himself from his duty, he one day left his stall, and returned with the truant, like the lost sheep in the parable, struggling in his stalwart arms. The greater part of his leisure being spent in reading, he was consulted by the whole convent as an oracle of knowledge; and he likewise was supposed to be frequently visited in his

1 A. Fernandez, Hist. de Plasencia, p. 196.

cell by the spirits of the departed. He wrote much, it is said, but on what subjects, or with what degree of merit, no evidence remains. The black letter folios in the library of the convent were frequently enriched with his notes, and of these a few have survived the neglect of three centuries, and the violence of three revolutions.' Such were the friars of Yuste whose names have survived in the records of the order; but there was one among them who likewise belongs to the nobler history of art. Fray Antonio de Villacastin was born, about 1512, of humble parents, in the small town of Castille, whence, according to Jeromite usage, he borrowed his name. Early left an orphan, he was brought up, or rather suffered to grow up, in the house of an uncle, without prospect of future provision, and without any preparation for gaining his bread except a slight knowledge of reading and writing. When about seventeen years old, being sent one day with a jug and a real to fetch some wine, the necessity of seeking his fortune struck him so forcibly as he walked along, that by the time his errand was done, his mind was made up. Meeting his sister in the street, he handed her the jug and the copper change, and taking the road at once, begged his way to Toledo, where he slept for the first night under the market tables in the square of Zocodover. He was found there next morning by a master tiler, who, pitying his forlorn condition, took him home, and taught him his trade of making wainscots and pavements of coloured tiles, at which he wrought for ten years for his food and clothing. At the end of this long appren

In the fine and curious Spanish library of Mr. Ford, there is a copy of the Chronica del Rey D. Alonzo el Onceno, fol. Valladolid: 1551, which has the following entry on the back of the last leaf: En veinte y dos de Mayo del año de m.d.lii. (?) compre yo frai Hernando de Corral este libro en trugillo costome xx reales. He then goes on to state the dates of the emperor's arrival at the convent and death, and of the deaths of queen Eleanor of France and queen Mary of Hungary.

ticeship, becoming enamoured of the monastic state, he begged a real-the only one he ever possessed-from his master's son, and entered the Jeromite convent at La Sisla, without the walls of Toledo. In assuming the cowl, however, he by no means laid aside the trowel, which was ever in his hand when the house stood in need of repair. Being a master of the practical part of building, he was also frequently employed in other monasteries of the order. In the Toledan nunnery of San Pablo, the operations were so extensive that he was at work there for several years; and his biographer mentions, in his praise, that when his duties ended he maintained no connexion with the nuns, 6 nor ever received any billets from them, a snare from which a friar so placed seldom escapes." His architectural reputation, after fifteen or sixteen years' practice in the cloister, stood so high, that the general Ortega selected him, in 1554, as master of the works at Yuste, which he had now completed to the entire satisfaction of the emperor. In these secular occupations he strengthened and improved the secular virtues of good temper and good sense, and yet maintained a high character for zeal and punctuality in the religious business of his cloth; unconscious that he was training himself for one of the most important posts ever filled in the world of art by a Spanish monk-that of master and surveyor of the works at the palace-monastery of the Escorial.

2

Fray Juan de Ortega, late general of the order, continued to reside with the fraternity of Yuste, although he still remained a member of his own convent at Alba de Tormes. In intelligence and manners he was greatly above the vulgar herd of friars, and was much esteemed

Siguença: Hist. de la orden de S. Geron. P. iii., p. 893. 2 Chap. iii., p. 57.

and trusted by the emperor, and even by his monkhating household.

In works of charity, that redeeming virtue of the monastic system, the fathers of Yuste were diligent and bounteous. Of wheat, six hundred fanegas, or about one hundred and twenty quarters, in ordinary years, and in years of scarcity sometimes as much as fifteen hundred fanegas, or three hundred quarters, were distributed at the convent-gate; large donations of bread, meat, oil, and a little money, were given, publicly or in private, by the prior, at Easter, Christmas, and other festivals; and the sick poor in the village of Quacos were freely supplied with food, medicine, and advice.

The emperor's house, or palace, as the friars loved to call it, although many a country notary is now more splendidly lodged, was more deserving of the approbation accorded to it by the monarch, than of the abuse lavished upon it by his chamberlain. Backed by the massive south wall of the church, the building presented a simple front of two storys to the garden and the noontide sun. Each story contained four chambers, two on either side of the corridor, which traversed the structure from east to west, and led at either end into a broad porch, or covered gallery, supported by pillars and open to the air. Each room was furnished with an ample fireplace, in accordance with the Flemish wants and ways of the chilly invalid. The chambers looking upon the garden were bright and pleasant, but those on the north side were gloomy, and even dark, the light being admitted to them only by windows opening on the corridor, or on the external and deeply shadowed porches. Charles inhabited the upper rooms, and slept in that at the north-east corner, from which a door, or window, had been cut in a slanting direction into the church, through the chancel wall, and close to the high