rez y Romea's
"Historia de la Arquitectura Cristiana Espanola en la Edad Media," a
work so comprehensive and scholarly that it practically stands alone.

It has seemed to me that certain buildings, and especially cathedrals,
cannot be properly studied quite apart from what surrounds them, or from
their past history. To look comprehendingly up at cathedral vaults and
spires, one must also look beyond them at the city and the people and
times that created them. In some such setting, the study of Avila,
Salamanca the elder and the younger, Burgos, Toledo, Leon, Segovia,
Seville, and Granada is here attempted, in the hope it will not prove
too technical for the ordinary traveler, nor too superficial for the
student of architecture. The cathedrals selected cover nearly all
periods of Gothic art, as interpreted in Spain, as well as the earlier
Romanesque and succeeding Renaissance, with which the Gothic was
mingled. All the great churches were the work of different epochs and
consequently contain several styles of architecture. The series here
described is very incomplete, but the book would have grown too bulky
had it included Santiago da Compostella with its heavenly portal, and
Barcelona or Gerona, Lerida or Tudela.

Whether we read a page of Cervantes, or gaze on one of Velasquez's
faces, or wander through one of the grand cathedrals of Spain, we
realize that this great world-empire has never ceased to exist in
matters of art, but still in the twentieth century must rouse our wonder
and admiration. In barren deserts, on parched and lonely plains, amid
hovels crumbling to decay, still stand the monuments of Spain's
greatness. But if nowhere else in the world can one find such glorious
works of art surrounded by such squalor, let us draw from the past the
promise of a revival in Spain of all that constitutes the true greatness
of a nation. In the fourth century, Bishop Hosius of Cordova was, from
every point of view, the first living churchman--Cordova itself became,
under the Ammeyad Caliphs in the tenth century, the most civilized, the
most learned, and the loveliest capital in Europe. Three hundred years
later, Alfonso X of Castile was not only a distinguished linguist and
poet, but the greatest astronomer and lawgiver of his age. When the
Spanish people have once more made education as general as it was under
the accomplished Arabs, and adopted the division of power insisted on
in a letter from Bishop Hosius to the Emp