tainly the most distinguished of their guests since the days when literature and politics had been discussed there by Avila and Sepulveda, Ruy Gomez and Garcilaso. About the middle of June in that year, lord John Russell left the camp of Wellington to visit the old quarters of Charles the Fifth. He found the palace of Yuste untenanted and unfurnished, but in tolerable repair, and the convent filled with monks, even more ignorant and stupid than those whose insolence and tattling moved the scorn of the secretary, or the ire of the testy chamberlain. The prophecy uttered by the preacher at the removal of the bones of Charles the Fifth had been completely fulfilled.' They had no traditions to tell of their imperial guest, nor any reverence for his memory, but rather a grudge against him, because the convent had been but little enriched by his will. They spoke of the visit of a Frenchman, doubtless M. Laborde, and said he was accompanied by an artist, who had disturbed the convent and the neighbourhood by sketching, an outrage for which he had very justly been put to death by the peasants, near Puente del Arzobispo. Amongst these enlightened churchmen no representative remained of the studious book-buying Fray Hernando de Corral, nor any vestige of the library, whose black letter tomes he was wont to read and annotate.

The brief triumph of the constitutionalists in 1820 was a signal for the first dispersion of the friars. During the vacancy of the monastery, the work of destruction went on briskly. The few vases belonging to the dispensary of Charles the Fifth which had escaped the French, were carried off by one Morales, an apothecary

Chap. v. p. 101.

2 For these facts I am indebted to the kindness of lord John Russell himself.

of liberal opinions, to his shop at Xarandilla. The patriots of Texeda helped themselves to the copy of the 'Glory' of Titian, and hung it in their parish church. The palace was utterly gutted, and the church was used as a stable.

When the arms of the holy alliance had once more placed the crown and the cowl in the ascendant, a handful of picturesque drones again gathered at their pleasant hive of Yuste. They feebly and partially restored it, patching up the offices formerly occupied by the emperor's servants into some cells and a refectory. But they were unable to raise money enough to pay for bringing their altar-piece back from Texeda. Mr. Ford, best of travellers, was one of the last of their visitors, passing a pleasant May-day with them in 1832, and sleeping at night in the chamber of the emperor. The monks were about twelve in number, and amongst them was a patriarch-Fray Alonso Cavallero, who had taken the cowl at Yuste, in 1778, and remembered Ponz and his visit. The good-natured, garrulous brotherhood' accompanied the stranger in his ramble about the ruined buildings and gardens; in the evening he supped with the prior and procurator in an alcove, overlooking the lovely Vera, and sweet and melodious with the scent of thyme and the song of nightingales; and at dawn, on the morrow, an early mass was said for the parting guest.'

Five years afterwards, in 1837, came the final suppression of the monasteries. The poor monks were again turned out, some to die of starvation near their old haunts, others to die for Don Carlos and the church on the hills of Biscay. The royal monastery of Yuste soon fell into utter and irremediable ruin.

Handbook; 1845, p. 551-3. The account of Yuste is one of the best travelling sketches in that charming book.

In the summer of 1849, in the course of a ride from Madrid to Lisbon, I paid a visit to the Vera of Plasencia. On the evening of the fourth of June, halting near the gate of Oropesa to look back over the noble stretch of plain, richly wooded with olive and ilex, which lay behind and beneath me, I fell into conversation with an aged priest of the town, who sat enjoying the thymescented air at the base of a way-side cross. When he learned that I was going to Yuste, he said that he had been a monk there for several years of his life, but that he believed that the convent was now in ruins, and scarce worth a visit. Having been lately reading, in the cathedral library of Toledo, the story of the emperor's retirement, as told in the classic page of Siguença, I endeavoured to ascertain from this ancient Jeromite, whether the traditions of his convent agreed with the narrative of the historian. The history of his order, however, had formed no part of the good friar's reading. He knew, he said, that Charles the Fifth had taken the monastic vows in the convent of Yuste, but he did not know whether he had performed his own obsequies or not, nor did he recollect that any anecdotes or traditions respecting him existed among the fraternity.

Next day I struck off the great Badajoz road at Navalmoral, and taking a northern direction across. the plain, soon entered the oak forest, which extends far into the Vera of Plasencia. Here the track became very narrow and indistinct, and the difficulty of keeping it was so much increased by a storm of rain followed by mist, that nothing but the guidance of a friendly woodman saved me from the inconveniences of a woodland bivouac. At sunset the clouds cleared away, and as the path led through open glades, or over cistus-covered knolls bare of wood, beautiful prospects

opened across the Vera to the hills in whose forest lap Yuste lay nestling unseen. The moon had risen on the groves of venerable chestnuts which embower the village of Quacos, ere I had knocked at the door of the little inn, and disturbed the colony of silkworms which seemed to fill the whole house, except the spot occupied by my bed.

Early on the following morning, the sixth of June, ascending through more groves of chestnut, yellow vineyards, green potatoe-fields, and orchards of fig and mulberry, I took the path to the monastery of Yuste. The corner of the garden wall, with its inscription, which Philip the Second had halted to read, was the first trace of the establishment which the screening woods permitted me to observe; and coasting that wall, I soon reached the great walnut-tree, and the three gates which led respectively to the convent, the church, and the palace. Having knocked at each of the crazy doors, after some delay, I was admitted into the monastic precincts by the only inhabitant, a peasant bailiff of the lay proprietors, who eked out his wages by showing the historical site to the passing stranger. The principal cloister was choked with the rubbish of the fallen upper story, the richly carved capitals which had supported it peeping here and there from the soil, and a thick mantle of wild shrubs and flowers. Two sides of the smaller and older cloister were still standing, with blackened walls and rotting floors and ceiling. The strong granite-built church, proof against the fire of the Gaul, and the wintry storms of the sierra, was a hollow shell, the classical decorations of the altar, and quaint woodwork of the choir, having been partly used for fuel, partly carried off to the parish church of Quacos. Beautiful blue and yellow tiles, which had lined the chancel, were fast dropping from the walls; and above, the window through

which the dying glance of Charles had sought the altar, remained like the eye-socket in a skull, turned towards the damp blank space that was once bright with holy tapers and the colouring of Titian.

In a vault beneath,

key could not be

approached by a door of which the found, I was told that the coffin of chesnut wood, in which the emperor's body had lain for sixteen years, was still kept as a relic. Of his palace, the lower chambers were used as a magazine for fuel; and in the rooms above, where he lived and died, maize and olives were garnered, and the silk-worm wound its cocoon in dust and darkness. His garden below, with its tank and broken fountain, was overgrown with tangled thickets of fig, mulberry, and almond, interspersed with a few patches of potherbs, and here and there an orange tree, or a cypress, to mark where once the terrace smiled with its blooming parterres. Within and without the buildings, time had dealt gently only with the great walnut-tree at the gates, which reared its giant head, and spread forth its broad and vigorous boughs over the mouldering walls to shroud and dignify their desolation. Yet in the lovely face of nature, changeless in its summer charms, in the hill and forest and wide Vera, in the generous soil and genial sky, there was enough to show how well the imperial eagle had chosen the nest wherein to fold his wearied wings.

Y