E S D E S D The ground plan of the building is said to occupy an area of 396,782 square feet, and the total area of all the stories would form a causeway one metre in breadth and 95 miles in length. There are seven towers, fifteen gateways, and, according to Los Santos, no fewer than 12,000 windows and doors. The general arrangement is shown by the accom panying plan. Entering by the main entrance the visitor finds himself in an atrium, called the Court of the Kings (Patio de los Reyes) from the statues of the kings of Judah, by Juan Bautista Monegro, which adorn the facade of the church. The sides of the atrium are unfortunately occupied by plain ungainly buildings five stories in height, awkwardly accommodating themselves to the upward slope of the ground. Of the grandeur of the church itself, however, there can be no question : it is the finest portion of the whole Escorial, and, according toFergusson. deserves to rank as one of the great Renaissance churches of Europe. It is about 340 feet from east to west by 200 from north to south, and thus occupies an area of about 70,000 square feet. The dome is 60 feet in diameter, and its height at the centre is about 320 feet. In glaring contrast to the bold and simple forms of the architecture, which belongs to the Doric style, were the bronze and marbles and pictures of the high altar, the masterpiece of the Milanese Giacomo Trezzo, almost ruined by the French. Directly under the altar is situated the pantheon or royal mausoleum, a richly decorated octagonal chamber with upwards of twenty niches, occupied by black marble urnas or sarcophagi, kept sacred for the dust of kings or mothers of kings. There are the remains of Charles V., of Philip II., and of all their successors on the Spanish throne down to Ferdinari VII., with the exception of Philip V. and Ferdinand VI. Several of the sarcophagi are still empty. For the other members of the royal family there is a separate vault, known as the Panteon de los Infantes, or more familiarly by the dreadfully suggestive name of El Pudridero. The most interesting room in the palace is Philip IL s cell, from which through an opening in the wall he could see the celebration of mass while too ill to leave his bed. The library, situated above the principal portico, was at one time one of the richest in Europe, com prising the king s own collection, the extensive bequest of Diego de Mendoza, Philip s ambassador to Rome, the spoils of the emperor of Morocco, Muley Zidan, and various con tributions from convents, churches, and cities. It suffered greatly in the fire of 1671, and has since been impoverished by plunder and neglect. Among its curiosities still extant are an ancient Koran, a Virgil of the 10th century, an Apocalypse of the 14th, El libra de los jucgos de Ajedrez, or " Book of the Games of Chess, " by Alphonso the Wise, and the original Alcala ordinance. Of the Arabic manuscripts which it contained in the 17th century a catalogue was given in Hottinger s Prompt uarium sive Bibliotheca Orien- talis, and another in the 18th, in Casiri s Bibliotheca Arabico-Hispanica, 2 vols., Madrid, 1760-70. Of the artistic treasures with which the Escorial was gradually en riched, it is sufficient to mention the frescoes of Peregrin Tibaldi, Carbajal, Bartolome Carducho, and Lucas Jordan, and the pictures of Claudio Coello, Titian, Tintoretto, Van der Weide, and Velasquez. Many of those that are mov able have been transferred to Madrid, and many others have perished by fire or sack. The conflagration of 1671, already mentioned, raged for fifteen days, and only the church, a part of the palace, and two towers e-.caped uninjured. In 1808 the whole building was exposed to the ravages of the French soldiers under Houssaye. On the night of the 1st of October 1872, the college and seminary, a part of the palace, and the upper library were devastated by fire ; but the damage occasioned by this has in great measure been repaired. The reader will find a remarkable description of the emotional influence, of the Escorial in Quinet s Vacances en Espagne; and for his torical and architectural details he may consult the following works : Fray Juan de San Geronimo, Memorias sobre la Fundacion del Escorial y su Fabrica, in the Coleccion de Documentos ineditos para la Historiade Espaua, vol. vii. ; Herrera, Sumarioy Breve De claration de los Disenos y Eslampas de la Fab. de S. Lorenzo del Escorial, Madrid, 1589; Jose de Siguenza, Historia de la Orden de San Gcronymo, Madrid, 1590, &c.; Cabrera, Felipe Segundo, 1619 ; James Wadsworth, Further Observations of the English Spanish Pilgrime, London, 1629, 1630 ; Ilario Mazzorali de Cremona. Le reali grandezze del Escuriale, Bologna, 1648 ; De los Santos, Description del real monasterio, &c., Madrid, 1657; Andres Ximenes, De scription, &c., Madrid, 1764 ; Quevedo, Historia del Real Mona sterio, &c., Madrid, 1849 ; Rotondo, Hist, artistica, &c., del monasterio de San Lorenzo, Madrid, 1856-1861; Prescott, Life of Philip II.; Mrs Pitt Byrne, Cosas deEspana, 1866; Fergusson, Hist. of the Modern Styles of Architecture, 1873. ESDRAS, BOOKS OF. The books called Esclras third and fourth in the sixth Article of the Church of England (1563) have been more commonly known to English readers since the publication of the Geneva Bible (1560) as Esdras first and second. In the earliest Protestant edition of the German Bible (where for the first time the apocry phal books were sharply separated from the canonical) these two books of Esdras or Ezra stood first in the former class (1530). Though neither of them was included by Luther in his version of the Apocrypha published in 1534, they both reappeared in Coverdale s English Bible (1535) at the head of the list, and this position they have maintained in all subsequent English translations. On the other hand, they do not occur in the Complutensian polyglot (1514-17); they were wholly excluded from the canon by the Council of Trent (1546) ; nor did they appear in the Sixtine edition of the Vulgate (1590). They were printed, however, in the Clementine edition of 1592, along with the Prayer of Manasseh, though merely as an appendix, and with a pre face to explain that they were permitted thus to appear only because they had been occasionally referred to by the fathers, and had found their way into some Latin Bibles both written and printed. Though associated thus closely in the vicissitudes of their later history, they have no such intimate relationship to one another as is suggested by their names. They differ widely in age, origin, theological interest, literary and historical importance, and must accord ingly be treated as entirely separate works. 1 ESDRAS, the Liber tertius Esdrce of the Vulgate and the thirty-nine Articles, is entitled in the Codex Vaticanus and in modern editions of the LXX. *Eo-Spas a , but in the Codex Alexandrinus simply 6 tepei s. With the exception of chaps, iii., iv., andv. 1-6, it is a mere compilation from the canonical work Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah. Chap, i., which gives an account of the celebration of the passover under Josiah, and then continues the history to the destruc tion of Jerusalem in 588 B.C., follows verse by verse the narrative of 2 Ch. xxxv. 1-xxxvL 21. There are, indeed, numerous verbal discrepancies, which show that the writer had before him a Hebrew text somewhat differ ent from that which we now possess, or else that he made use of a Greek version other than the Alexan drian. Sometimes, too, he may seem to have delibe rately abridged or expanded the text that lay before him ; but the fact that on the whole he depended on the Chronicler must be abundantly manifest to any reader, and needs not be demonstrated here. The whole of the canonical book of Ezra is next incorporated, but with an interpolation and a dislocation. Chap. ii. 1-14, telling of the edict of Cyrus and the return of the Jews under " Samanassar " or " Sanabassar," closely follows Ezra L In like manner, chap. ii. 15-25, telling how the works at Jerusalem were interrupted by the interdict of Artaxerxes, though introduced at an earlier stage in the narrative, is
entirely derived from Ezra iv. 7-24. Chap. iiL 1-v. 6,