rs at present. The recent governmental
closure of the old cathedral in Alcala has deprived the partisans of the
double see of one of their chief arguments, namely, the possession of a
worthy temple, unique in the world as regards its organization.
Consequently, it is generally stated that the title of Madrid-Alcala
will die out with the present bishop, and that the next will simply be
the Bishop of Madrid.

_Madrid_

The city of Madrid is new and uninteresting; it is an overgrown village,
with no buildings worthy of the capital of a kingdom. From an
architectural point of view, the royal palace, majestic and imposing,
though decidedly poor in style, is about the only edifice that can be
admired.

In history, Madrid plays a most unimportant part until the times of
Philip II., the black-browed monarch who, intent upon erecting his
mausoleum in the Escorial, proclaimed Madrid to be the only capital.
That was in 1560; previously Magerit had been an Arab fortress to the
north of Toledo, and the first in the region now called Castilla la
Nueva (New Castile), to distinguish it from Old Castile, which lies to
the north of the mountain chain.

Most likely Magerit had been founded by the Moors, though, as soon as it
had become the capital of Spain, its inhabitants, who were only too
eager to lend their town a history it did not possess, invented a series
of traditions and legends more ridiculous than veracious.

On the slopes of the last hill, descending to the Manzanares, and beside
the present royal palace, the Christian conquerors of the Arab fortress
in the twelfth century discovered an effigy of the Virgin, in an
_almudena_ or storehouse. This was the starting-point for the traditions
of the twelfth-century monks who discovered (?) that this effigy had
been placed where it was found by St. James, according to some, and by
the Virgin herself, according to others; what is more, they even
established a series of bishops in Magerit previous to the Arab
invasion.

No foundations are of course at hand for such fabulous inventions, and
if the effigy really were found in the _almudena_, it must have been
placed there by the Moors themselves, who most likely had taken it as
their booty when sacking a church or convent to the north.

The patron saint of Madrid is one Isidro, not to be confounded with San
Isidoro of Leon. The former was a farmer or labourer, who, with his
wife, lived a quiet and unpretentious life in the vic