nly of learned professors of the university, as were also its
canons; Leon X. gave it the enviable title of La Magistral, the Learned,
which points it out as unique in the Christian world. The Polyglot
Bible, published in the sixteenth century, and famous in all Europe, was
worked out by these scholars under Cisneros's direction, and the
favoured city outshone the newly built Madrid twenty miles away, and
rivalled Salamanca in learning, and Toledo in worldly and religious
splendour.

Madrid grew greater and greater as years went by, and consequently
Alcala de Henares dwindled away to the shadow of a name. The university,
the just pride of the Complutenses, was removed to the capital; the
cathedral, for lack of proper care, became an untimely ruin; the
episcopal palace was confiscated by the state, which, besides repairing
it, filled its seventy odd halls with rows upon rows of dusty documents
and governmental papers.

To-day the city drags along a weary, inactive existence: soldiers from
the barracks and long-robed priests from the church fill the streets,
and are as numerous as the civil inhabitants, if not more so; convents
and cloisters of nuns, either grass-grown ruins or else sombre grated
and barred edifices, are to be met with at every step.

Strangers visit the place hurriedly in the morning and return to Madrid
in the afternoon; they buy a tin box of sugar almonds (the city's
specialty), carelessly examine the university and the archiepiscopal
palace, gaze unmoved at some Cervantes relics, and at the facade of the
cathedral. Besides, they are told that in such and such a house the
immortal author of Don Quixote was born, which is a base, though
comprehensible, invention, because no such house exists to-day.

That is all; perchance in crossing the city's only square, the traveller
notices that it can boast of no fewer than three names, doubtless with a
view to hide its glaring nakedness. These three names are Plaza de
Cervantes, Plaza Mayor, and Plaza de la Constitucion, of which the
latter is spread out boldly across the town hall and seems to invoke the
remembrance of the ephemeral efforts of the republic in 1869.

In the third century after the birth of Christ, two infants, Justo and
Pastor, preached the True Word to the unbelieving Roman rulers of
Complutum. The result was not in the least surprising: the two infants
lost their baby heads for the trouble they had taken in trying to
trouble warriors.