y VII, himself a Benedictine. And so Saint
Isidore's quaint old hymn with the accompanying melody was banished from
all but one or two favored chapels. Fortunately Cardinal Ximenez became
its enthusiastic and powerful protector. He endowed in the Cathedral of
Toledo a special chapel and had thirteen priests trained for the
service, "Mozarabes sodales." In Ximenez' time a German, Peter
Hagenbach, first printed "missale secundum regulam beati Isidori dictum
Mozarabes," what Saint Isidore called "those fleeting sounds so hard to
note down." His breviary was the first Roman one to be used in Spanish
churches.

To enumerate the endless rows of chapels with their countless treasures
and chaste or tawdry architecture and decoration would be tiresome and
unprofitable,--with a plan and guide-book, one may pass them in review.
"Sixty-seven of the great sculptors and thirty-eight of the painters
here display to the astonished and incredulous eye the masterpieces of
their hand," says one. Here is almost every painter belonging to the
great Sevillian school of painting of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. They form a veritable museum or a series of small museums,
each chapel being a separate room of masterpieces. But here, as in the
museum, there are good and bad paintings and statues, and only the
excellent are worth attention. They are better worth studying here than
elsewhere, for they have been left in the surroundings for which they
were intended and painted. Spain's great religious artist did not paint
his Madonnas so full of distracting and sensuous loveliness for the
walls of the Prado; their smiles, human and pathetic, were for the
altars and panels of sanctuaries. Here is the light in which they were
studied and for which they were colored; here are the walls and frames
which were intended to surround them; they are in the company they
would choose, and they were painted with the same religious devotion
that inspires the prayers now offered before them. The painter's
inspiration sprang from the fervor of his faith.

Three of the paintings are lovely above all others. Two are Murillo's,
namely the Angel de la Guarda and the San Antonio of the baptistery; the
third is the Deposition from the Cross, by Pedro de Campana (or more
correctly Kempeneer), hanging in the great sacristy. This is the
painting, Spanish historians will tell you, Murillo loved so well that
whenever he was downhearted he would stand in front of it