such an
exclamation from those acrimonious lips and jaded eyes. The men who
designed and erected it were the best known in Spain. There was Philip,
the Burgundian sculptor with exquisite and indefatigable chisel, who had
come to Spain in the train of the Emperor. Vallejo, one of the famous
council that sat at Salamanca, had with Castanela erected the triumphal
arch which appeased Charles's wrath kindled against the citizens of
Burgos, and is even to-day, after the Cathedral, the city's most
familiar landmark. In the year 1567, twenty-eight years after the
falling of the first lantern, the new one towered completed in its
place. It was a magnificent attempt at a blending, or rather a
reconciliation, of the Renaissance and the Gothic. There is the
character of one and the form of the other. Gothic trefoil arches and
traceries are carried by classical columns. Renaissance balustrades and
panels intermingle with crockets and bosses, and Florentine panels and
statues with Gothic canopies. They are so interwoven that the careful
student of architecture feels himself in a nightmare of styles and
different centuries. It was of course an undertaking doomed to failure.

The outline is octagonal. Above the pendentives, forming the transition
of the octagon, comes a double frieze of armorial bearings (those of
Burgos and Charles V) and inscriptions, and a double clerestory,
separated and supported by classical balustraded passages; the window
splays and heads are a complete mass of carving and decorations. The
vaulting itself contains within its bold ribs and segments an infinite
variety of stars, as if one should see the panes of heaven covered with
frosty patterns of a clear winter morning.

Theophile Gautier's description of it is interesting as an expression of
the effect it produced on a man of artistic emotions rather than trained
architectural feeling: "En levant la tete," he says, "on apercoit une
espece de dome forme par l'interieur de la tour,--c'est un groupe de
sculpture, d'arabesques, de statues, de colonettes, de nervures, de
lancettes, de pendentifs, a vous donner le vertige. On regarderait deux
ans qu'on n'aurait pas tout vu. C'est touffu comme un chou, fenestre
comme une truelle a poisson; c'est gigantesque comme une pyramide et
delicat comme une boucle d'oreille de femme, et l'on ne peut comprendre
qu'un semblable filigrane puisse se soutenir en l'air depuis des
siecles."

[Illustration: Photo by J. Lacoste, Ma