Through Portugal

INTRODUCTION

Portugal had been familiar to me from my earliest youth, for my road to and from Spain had often lain that way, and circumstances had made me conversant with the language and history of the country; and yet this book is not the outcome of any such previous knowledge, but mainly of one short voyage in search of change and health. It happened in this way. As oft befalls men who in this striving world have to wring their brains for drachmas, the completion of a particularly arduous book had left me temporarily a nervous wreck, sleepless and despairing. The first and most obvious need dictated to me by those who settle such matters, was to forget for a time that pens, ink, and paper existed, and to seek relaxation in a clime where printers cease from troubling and reviewers are at rest. But where? Spain certainly would offer me no such a haven: France was too near home, Germany I disliked, Switzerland was trite and overrun, the novelty of Italy I had long before exhausted, and Greece was too far away. A sea voyage was xiia desideratum, but it must not be too long, and as the autumn was already verging towards winter the south alone was available.

Then in the midst of my perplexity the happy thought suggested itself that, often as I had passed through Portugal, I had never seen the country. Why not try Portugal? I had some prejudices to overcome, prejudices, indeed, which up to that time had prevented me from seeking a deeper knowledge of the land and people than could be gained by an incurious glance on the way through. For I had been brought up in the stiff Castilian tradition that Portugal was altogether an inferior country, and the Portuguese uncouth boors who in their separation from their Spanish kinsmen had left to the latter all the virtues whilst they themselves had retained all the vices of the race. But, withal, I chose Portugal, and have made this book my apologia as a self-prescribed penance for my former injustice towards the most beautiful country and the most unspoilt and courteous peasantry in Southern Europe. Portugal and the Portuguese, indeed, have fairly conquered me, and the voyage, of which some of the incidents are here set forth, was for me a continual and unadulterated delight from beginning to end, bringing to me refreshment and renewed vigour of soul, mind, and body, opening to my eyes, though they had seen xiiimuch of the world, prospects of beauty unsurpassed in my experience, and revealing objects of antiquarian and artistic interest unsuspected by most of those to whom the attractions of the regular round of European travel have grown flat and familiar.

It is impossible, of course, to pass on to others the full measure of enjoyment felt by an appreciative traveller in a happy trip through an unhackneyed pleasure-ground; but it has occurred to me that some record of my impressions on the way may lead other Englishmen to seek for themselves a repetition of the pleasure and benefit which I experienced in the course of a short holiday trip through Portugal from north to south. I am not pretending to write a guidebook: those that exist are doubtless sufficient for all purposes, although I have intentionally refrained from consulting any of them, in order that my impressions might not be biassed, even unconsciously, by the opinions of others; nor do I claim to speak of Portugal with the fulness of knowledge exhibited by Mr. Oswald Crawford in his books on the country where he resided so long. My object is rather to treat the subject from the point of view of the intelligent visitor in search of sunshine, health, or relaxation; to suggest from my own experience routes of travel and points of attraction likely to appeal to such xiva reader as I have in my mind, and to warn him frankly of the inevitable small inconveniences which he must be prepared to tolerate cheerfully if he would enjoy to the full a holiday spent in a country not as yet overrun by tourists who insist upon carrying England with them wherever they go. If he will consent to “play the game,” and not expect the impossible in such a country, I can promise my traveller a voyage full of colour, interest, and novelty in this “garden by the side of the sea,” where pines and palms grow side by side, and the stern north and softer south blend their gifts in lavish luxuriance beneath the happy conjunction of almost perpetual sunshine and moist Atlantic breezes.

I OPORTO

I stood in the centre of a daring bridge, spanning with one bold arch of nigh six hundred feet a winding rocky gorge. Far, far below me ran a chocolate-coloured river crowded with quaint craft, some with high-raised sheltered poops and crescent-peaked prows, some low and long astern with bows like gondolas and bright red lateen sails, upon which the fierce sun blazed sanguinely. On the right side thickly, and on the left more sparsely, climbing up the stony sides of the gorge, were piled hundreds of houses, pink, pale-blue, buff, and white, all with glowing red-tiled roofs, and each set amidst a riot of verdure which trailed and waved upon every nook and angle uncovered by buildings. Trellised vines clustered and flowers flaunted in tiny back-yards 2and square-enclosed courts by the score, all on different levels, but all open to the down-gazing eyes of the spectator on the bridge high above them. Here and there a tall palm waved its plumes as in unquiet slumber, but everywhere else was the impression of ardent, throbbing, exuberant life, such as all organic creation feels under the spur of stinging sunshine and the salt twang of the sea-breeze. The river gorge winds and turns so tortuously that the view forward and backward is not extensive, but as far as the eye reaches on each side of the umber stream the hills of houses and far-spread terraced vineyards beyond rise precipitously, with just a quayside at foot on the banks of the stream, thronged now with folk who swarm, gather, and separate like gaudy ants, and apparently no bigger, as seen from the coign of vantage on the bridge. To my left, as I stand looking towards the west, there crowns the summit of the ridge close by a vast white monastery against a green background; a monastery now, alas! like all others in this Catholic land, profanated and turned to purposes of war instead of peace, but, withal, there still rears its modest rood aloft upon the crest one poor little round chapel where the 3sainted image of Pilar of the Ridge stolidly receives the devotion of the faithful. To the right, the height is crowned by a vast square episcopal palace, and near it, over all, is the glittering golden cross that shines upon the city from the summit of the square cathedral towers. This is Oporto, The Port par excellence, which gives its name to Portugal, seen from the double-decked iron bridge of Dom Luis over the Douro.

For days I had been striving in vain to get into touch with the psychic principle of this strange city. I had mixed with the motley multitudes that lounge and labour upon the quays, I had lingered in the gilded churches where worshippers were ominously few, and stood for hours observant in chaffering marketplaces and amidst the crowds of sauntering citizens in the inevitable Praça de Dom Pedro; but till the revelatory moment came to me in one enlightening flash upon the Bridge of Dom Luis, I had always been alone in a foreign throng whose composite inner soul I could not read. But now all was changed. Thenceforward I saw Oporto whole and not in disintegrated fragments as before; for I had learnt the secret of 4putting the pieces of the puzzle together and the heart of the city was bared to me, a stranger.

Every large, enduring community comes to attain a distinct character of its own, which the outlander can only know by long association or sympathetic insight, sometimes not at all. I had looked for a people exuberant and gay in outward seeming with an underlying spirit of bitter mockery, such as I had known in so many other Iberian cities; but somehow these Oporto people were quite different. Grave and quiet, with introspective eyes, even the children seemed to take their play soberly. Look at the slim slip of a boy who gravely walks at the head of this team of enormous fawn-coloured oxen, toilsomely dragging their ponderous load up a hill so steep as almost to need a ladder to ascend. The urchin cannot be more than ten or eleven, and in any other country would alternately skip and idle, or at least allow his attention to wander with every fresh object that struck his fancy. Here he stalks along for hours at a time, without lingering or straying, always calm and patient, whilst his soiled and hardened bare feet plod on, heedless both of the white mire and sharp stones of the way. Over his shoulder he carries a long 5lithe wand, double as tall as himself, with which he directs the course of the great wide-horned bullocks. A mere turn of the wand is sufficient to indicate the way, and with low bowed heads beneath the heavy yoke the dull beasts plod slowly onward as long-suffering as their guide. The whole equipage might belong to the times when the world itself was young, so idyllic is it in form. The wain is narrow and high-set upon two wheels, like an ancient chariot, with boards or high rods to form its sides; the wheels are built up ponderously of solid wood, the two thick spokes that connect the heavy tire with the hub filling up most of the circle, and the axle, a heavy log of wood, itself turns with the wheels. In this part of Portugal there stands erect upon the neck of the team an adornment which is usually the pride of the owner’s heart, and the one superfluous article of luxury he possesses. It is a thick board of hardwood, about eighteen inches high and some five feet broad, intricately and beautifully carved in fretted open-work arabesques. The patterns are traditional, handed down from time immemorial, and usually consist of involved geometrical and curvilinear designs; sometimes, but not often, with a cross introduced 6in the centre, and with a row of little bristle brushes as an extra adornment along the top. A glance at this elaborate piece of ox furniture will show that its decoration is of Moorish origin, and the canga itself may be the survival of the high ox yoke still seen in some oriental countries. To complete the quaint picture of the universal ox team, for this part of Portugal is not a country of horses or mules, the dress of the small teamster must be described. The boy’s breeches usually do not reach below the knee, the rest of the legs and feet being bare; a jacket of brown homespun is slung upon one shoulder, except at night or during the cold winter days of December and January, when it is worn, and the shirt, open at the neck and breast, leaves much of the upper part of the body exposed. The headgear is peculiar. It is nearly always a knitted stocking bag cap, something like an old-fashioned nightcap, with a tassel at the end of the bag which hangs down the back or upon the shoulder of the wearer, its colour being sometimes green and red, but more frequently black.

The boy, like his similarly garbed elders, takes life very seriously, but neither he nor they seem sad or depressed. There is here none of the 7squalid misery or whining mendicancy that are so distressing to strangers in Spain and Southern Italy, for the Portuguese of the north is a sturdy, self-respecting peasant, who works hard and lives frugally upon his three testoons (1s. 3d.) per day; and so long as he can earn his dried stockfish, his beans, bread, and grapes, with a little red wine to drink, he scorns to beg for the indulgence of his idleness.

These are the people, and their social betters of the same race, whom a sudden flash of sympathy brought closer to me, as in the pellucid golden sunlight all Oporto was spread before and beneath me, palpitating with life. The absence of vociferation and vehemence in the people did not mean sulkiness or stupidity, but was the result of the intense earnestness with which their daily life was faced; their unregarding aloofness towards strangers was not rudeness, but the highest courtesy which bade them avoid obtrusive curiosity; and soon I learnt to know that their cold exterior barely concealed a disinterested desire to extend in fullest measure aid and sympathy to those who needed them. In all my wanderings I have never met, except perhaps in Norway, a peasantry so full of willingness to 8show courtesy to strangers without thought of gain to themselves as these people of north Portugal, almost pure Celts as they are, with the Celtic innate kindliness of heart and ready sympathy, though, of course, with the Celtic shortcomings of jealousy, inconstancy, and distrust.

I know few more characteristic thoroughfares than the road by the river-side at Oporto, called the Ribeira, which is the centre of maritime activity of the port. The path runs beneath what was the ancient river-wall, now pierced or burrowed out to form caverns of shops, where wine and food, cordage and clothing are sold to sailor men. Many of the open doors have vine trellises before them, in the shade of which quaintly garbed groups forgather, and a constant tide of men and women flows along the path, eddying into and out of the cavernous recesses in the ancient wall. Colour, flaring and fierce in the sun, flaunts everywhere; for the multi-tinted rags of the south festoon and flutter from every door and window and deck the persons of all the womankind. Swinging along, with peculiar and ungainly gait, go the women with prodigious burdens upon their heads. Everything, from babies to bales of merchandise, is borne upon the female head in Portugal; and these women of the north wear a peculiar headgear adapted to this custom. It is a round, soft, pork-pie hat of black cloth or velveteen, fitting well upon the top of the head, the upper rim being adorned with a sort of standing silk fringe. Such a hat, especially when surmounted by a knot, suffers no damage from a burden placed upon it; but the constant carrying of tremendous weights upon the head of females, even of little girls, quite spoils the figures of the women, thrusting the hips and pelvis forward inordinately, and rendering the movements in walking most ungraceful. The women and girls almost invariably go barefooted, whilst the men, except the fishermen, usually are shod; and the females of a family share to the full the work and hardships which are the common lot.

EVENING OPPOSITE OPORTO.

9Along the shore of the busy Ribeira lie ships unloading, small craft they usually are, for the bar of the Douro is a terrible one, and the big ships now enter the harbour of Leixões, a league away. In a constant stream the men and women pass across the planks from ship to shore, carrying the cargo upon their heads or shoulders in peculiar boat-shaped baskets, which are the 10inseparable companion of the Oporto workers. Here is a smart schooner hailing from the Cornish port of Fowey, from which stockfish from Newfoundland is being landed on the heads of women, flat salt slabs as hard and dry as wood, but good nutritious food for all that; and farther along, with their prows to the shore, rest a dozen un-ladened wine and fruit boats from up the Douro, and flat-bottomed passenger skiffs into which women and men with baskets and bundles, representing their week’s supplies purchased in Oporto, are crowding to be carried back to their homes in the rich vineyard villages miles up the river. One by one the quaint craft hoist their crimson sails, and struggle out from the tangle of the bank, until the breeze catches them, and in a shimmer of red gold from the setting sun they hustle through the brown tide until a projecting corner hides them from view. It is a scene never to be forgotten.

The centre of the Ribeira is the Praça called after it, where a sloping square facing the water opens out. The scene is picturesque in the extreme. The space is thronged by men, either sleeping in their baskets or carrying them filled with fish or merchandise upon their heads: a 11motley, water-side crowd, men of all nations, pass to and fro, or gossip under the vine trellis before the wine shop overlooking the square, and as the observer casts his eyes upwards he sees the gaily coloured houses piled apparently on the top of one another, until at the top of all, as if overhead, is the glaring white palace of the bishop, and the glittering cathedral cross, standing out hard and clear against a sky of fathomless indigo.

This busy river-side way of the Ribeira is, so to speak, a street of two storeys. Below is the walk I have described, with the cavernous shops in the face of the old river-wall, and on the top of the wall is another path reached by occasional flights of steps, and also bordered by the squalid medley of dark shops in which strange savoury-odoured victuals are washed down by strong red wine, and quiet brown men and women, and grave-eyed swarthy babies are inextricably mixed up with brown merchandise in the gloom beyond the glaring sunlight. Unexpected steep alleys, arched and mysterious, lead to the thoroughfares higher up the precipitous slope, and the next storey, a parallel narrow street, the Rua do Robelleiro, narrow, 12dark, and ancient, is almost as picturesque as the Ribeira itself.

A slab let into the river-wall by the beach commemorates one of the most terrible days in Oporto’s history. The English army had been chased to its ships at Corunna, and the Spanish levies scattered: the Peninsula seemed to be at the mercy of the French legions, which, under Napoleon’s greatest marshals, held the richest provinces of Spain in the name of King Joseph Bonaparte. But 9000 English troops remained in Lisbon, and with Portugal in the hands of his enemies Napoleon knew that he would never be master of Spain. So the word went forth that Soult was to march down with a great army from Galicia, and sweep the English out of Portugal. It seemed easy, and authorities even in England believed that Portugal was untenable and should be evacuated. All but one man, Arthur Wellesley, whose victory at Vimeiro in the previous year had been wasted by the inept old women who were his superior officers. With 20,000 men, said Wellesley, he would hold Portugal against 100,000 French, the marshals notwithstanding; and the great Englishman had his way. Beresford was sent out to reorganise 13the scattered Portuguese fighting men, and Arthur Wellesley sailed from England with his little army to face Soult in Portugal. Before he arrived in Lisbon the French had swept down from Galicia, and on the 27th March 1809, Soult summoned Oporto to surrender. The warlike Bishop of Oporto was heading the hastily organised defence; his forces were undisciplined and badly armed, but their hearts were stout, and behind their poor earthworks the citizens of Oporto and their bishop bade defiance to Soult and his invading army.

On the 29th March at dawn the devoted city was stormed by Napoleon’s veterans, who swept all before them. There was no quarter, no mercy, and the steep streets of the city were turned to blood-smeared shambles. Down to the river bank flocked the affrighted people, falling as they ran under the rain of bullets that pursued them. Over the river from the Ribeira was a bridge of boats, and upon this the crowd of panic-stricken fugitives poured. The weight sank it, and thousands were drowned in the Douro, or struggled ashore only to be despatched by the French, whilst many of those who had been in arms deliberately drowned themselves rather 14than surrender. Eighteen thousand Portuguese perished on that awful day, without counting the drowned who were never recovered; whilst of the whole Portuguese host only two hundred live prisoners were taken.

Six weeks afterwards the tables were turned; six weeks spent by Soult in intrigues for his own advancement, and by his officers in discontented idleness. On the 12th May Wellesley and his army from Lisbon surprised him at Oporto in broad daylight, crossing the river a few miles above the city by a brilliant piece of daring, and Soult ignominiously fled north, leaving impedimenta and baggage behind him, harassed and scattered by the Portuguese peasants in arms, until a mere remnant of his force finally found refuge in Spain. The very dinner to which he was about to sit down at Oporto when he was surprised regaled Sir Arthur Wellesley instead, and the victor took up his residence in that big white monastery on the Serra de Pilar, which from the height on the left of the bridge affords a panorama of unequalled beauty of the city opposite on its amphitheatre of hills, shining white and stately against the dark background of the sky.

15However you go from the lower level by the river-side to the main streets of the city the climb is a severe one, for in this town of precipitous hills the gradients are startling, even for the electric trams which of late years have completely taken possession of the streets. But we will leave the electric trams on this peregrination, and face the ascent on foot from the lower level of the bridge on the Ribeira itself to the upper town. First some toilsome flights of steps which have taken the place of the lower end of a precipitous alley, cut away to make the approach to the bridge, lead you up about two hundred feet to an ancient winding lane which itself is almost a flight of steps. Quaint foreign interiors are disclosed through the open doors of the dark humble abodes that line the way, and poor little home industries are carried on coram populo; half-way up the ladder-like ascent there is a ruined church, and by-and-by on the right we skirt the great battlemented wall of the vast disestablished monastery of Santa Clara. At a turn in the wall the corner of the grim old edifice itself appears, fortress-like and looming here as built for defence in the fierce times of long ago. Through the doubly-grated windows, a few feet 16above our heads, brown paws are thrust out, and a hoarse murmur from within takes form, by-and-by, as a demand for alms in the name of God. A glance inside makes one start back in horror, almost in disgust, though the sorry spectacle unfortunately soon becomes familiar to those who sojourn in any large Portuguese town. Huddled in squalor and filth together are half-naked, savage-looking criminals, old men, sturdy vagabonds, and youths almost children, staring out from the gloom of the prison-house through the unglazed barred windows, with whining prayer for charity, ribald jest, or explosive curses. These gaol-birds, herded publicly in their unutterable degradation behind the gratings, form the blackest spot visible in Portuguese life. Even Spain for the most part has brought her prisons into some semblance of civilised order, but Portugal in this one respect lags inexplicably behind.

FROM THE RIBEIRA, OPORTO.

A few yards distant, through a little maze of mediæval streets, is the cathedral, the Sé, with a quiet little courtyard before it, from the parapet of which the red roofs and abundant verdure of the city spread downward in waves to the water-side. These north Portuguese cathedrals are marvellously alike; sharing the early beauties and 17later barbarities of their successive generations of masters. This of Oporto is a good specimen. The sturdy warrior kings who wrested Portugal, bit by bit, from Castilian and from Moor, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, were true crusaders. Where they set their foot sprang up the Christian church, to testify for ever their gratitude for victory vouchsafed to the Cross that symbolised their faith. Solid and staidly devotional were the edifices they raised; and wherever their work remains unconcealed by the scrolly banalities of a later age, it bears still the impress of simple faith and unostentatious grandeur. Here on the hill crest at Oporto stand two massive low towers, one still crowned by the pointed Morisco machicolations of the twelfth century, whilst its fellow, partly rebuilt, is spoilt by the addition of a trivial eighteenth-century parapet, with urns as an adornment. Still, the massive solidity of the towers remains, which is something to be thankful for when we regard the hideous top-heavy early eighteenth-century façade that connects them. The south door, of majestic romanesque, is similarly marred. Around it has been built a barbarous porch, overloaded with meaningless ornament, which not only obscures 18the serious work of the early builder, but half covers and cuts in two a lovely old round window above the door which lights the transept inside. But, however much these curly horrors of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries may distract the eye, they do not destroy what is still visible of the old edifice. The double flight of low steps, for instance, which leads to this south door has for handrails two ancient stone serpents, so simple in design, yet so effective and perfectly adapted for their purpose, as to prove the unaffected but consummate artistry of the designer, whose taste must have been formed whilst yet the Byzantine traditions were strong in the stern romanesque.

One is struck at once in entering any of these cathedrals, and more particularly that of Oporto and its close congener Braga, with the vast difference between them and the pompous, splendid Spanish cathedrals. In the latter the span of the nave is usually tremendous, the church is plunged in tinted gloom, and the whole of the centre of the nave is blocked by an immense choir. Here in North Portugal the note struck in the cathedrals is not mystery richly dight, as in Spain, but sincere austerity, and a simple faith so essential in 19the edifice that the grave granite columns and arches appear as unaffected by the heaps, and piles, and masses of curly carved gilt wood around them as a monolith might be by the lizards that bask and slither round its base. Here in Oporto, for instance, the low, massive, granite pillars that line the narrow nave, and support the round romanesque arches, seem sullenly to bid defiance to time and decay; such is their prodigious solidity. And yet even these a later age has surmounted, if not adorned, with curly Corinthian capitals of carved gilt wood! Every altar here, and indeed nearly all over Portugal, is an overloaded mass of this particular barbaric style of decoration dear to the Portuguese since the seventeenth century. The skill in its production is undeniably great, especially in the chapel of St. Vincent in Oporto Cathedral; and in moderation the employment of richly painted, carved, and gilded wood generally may be advantageous where the light is low and the architectural style ornate. But here, where the simple romanesque prevails and the churches are flooded with light, it overwhelms one. In this low, old, plain Sé, either gilded wood or high-relief designs in beaten gold or silver in endless intricacy strike the eye unmercifully 20at every turn. On one of these ornate altars, screened by a curtain which a fee will raise, stands the ancient effigy, which those who still hold the simple faith of their fathers venerate so devoutly—Our Lady of Alem. Ages ago, so the story runs, when this old fane was yet a-building in the twelfth century, some Douro fishermen found their nets heavy with an unusual burden, and raising them, found this image, a miraculous gift vouchsafed them from the sea. Since then the prayers of those who win their living on the deep have been ceaselessly offered to the Lady of Alem for safety and good luck, and simple offerings of gratitude for boons thus gained—for sickness healed or safe return—hang thickly round the shrine.

The beautiful little cloisters of the cathedral are of a later date than the church—grave and simple Gothic of the late fourteenth century, with three small pointed lancet arches in each span, and a plain round light in the tympanum above. But even here the eighteenth century has done some damage by building out highly ornamental buttresses between the main spans. All around on the inner wall of the cloister is a decoration which abounds in nearly every Portuguese church that 21has lived through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—namely, large pictorial representations in blue and white tiles, like those commonly connected with the town of Delft. In the churches these tile pictures usually represent scenes from Scripture history, with a large admixture of heathen mythology or ordinary emblematic fancies, as here in Oporto, and the effect is quaint and not unpleasing. One of the things indeed which most strongly strike a stranger in Portugal, in the north especially, is the almost universal employment of glazed tiles, azulejos, both inside and outside buildings of all kinds, the majority of the better sort of dwelling-houses being entirely covered outside by tile designs in colours, sometimes very elaborate and beautiful. The custom exists to some extent in Spain, but is not so common there as in Portugal. In each case, however, the taste and original manufacture, like the name of these tiles, are clearly Moorish, and in some of the older edifices, to be mentioned later, the tiles themselves date from a period when Moors or Mudejares produced them.

In the sacristy of Oporto Cathedral they will show you a painting on terra-cotta of the Virgin and Child, backed by St. Joseph and 22angels bearing a cross, which is asserted to be a Raphael. The composition and drawing are clearly the work of a disciple of his school, but the colouring is dull and grey, such as the great one of Urbino would never have produced. Not this so-called Raphael, but another picture of the highest interest and beauty, is the principal artistic treasure of the city. In the board-room of Oporto’s most cherished and beneficent institution, the vast charitable organisation called the Misericordia, there hangs a painting that has few, if any, equals in Portugal. It is claimed for Jan Van Eyck, who is known to have been in Portugal for two years at about the period (1520) represented by the work, though personally I could see but slight traces of the peculiar quality of either of the brothers Van Eyck. Certainly it is broader in style than anything I have seen from the brush of the younger brother Jan, and may well be the work of Hubert Van der Goes or Hans Memling. But, whoever may be the painter, the picture is a magnificent one. Against a background representing a typical Flemish landscape and walled town, such as Memling loved to paint, 23there is a highly ornamented font filled with a pool of blood replenished from the stream that issues from the Saviour’s side, as He hangs upon the cross rising from the centre of the pool. Upon the edge of the font, on each side of the cross, in attitudes of prayer, stand two lovely life-size figures of the Virgin and St. John, whilst in the foreground there kneel, in regal robes of crimson, ermine, and gold brocade, the figures of the founder of the Misericordia in 1499, King Manuel the Fortunate and his wife. Kneeling behind them in decreasing size are members of their family, and on the farther side beyond the font are groups of ecclesiastics and laymen, all evidently life-like portraits of prominent courtiers, or benefactors of the institution. The colouring of the picture is glowing and gorgeous in the extreme, and the loving care expended upon the details is such as only the early Flemings had patience to exercise, accompanied by a breadth and boldness unusual in most of them. Fons Vitæ, as the painting is called, from an inscription on the edge of the font, is emblematical of the foundation of the home of mercy it adorns. Nor is it the only art 24treasure the Misericordia possesses, apart from the hundreds of awful daubs representing dead and gone benefactors that crowd every inch of wall-space. There is to be seen a beautiful Gothic gold chalice of fifteenth-century Portuguese work, some fifteen inches high, a specimen of the famous handicraft of the city, of great interest, the work being of the most intricate and elaborate description, and the condition of the jewel perfect.

Away from the river-side and the immediate surroundings of the cathedral, Oporto has little to show in the form of architectural quaintness. A busy, bustling place of modern-looking houses for the most part, the streets dominated by the indispensable electric tramways, casting scorn upon the lumbering ox wains that alone compete with them. Yet the city has some striking points that should not be missed. The view is very fine, for instance, from the top of the main modern shopping thoroughfare, the Rua de S. Antonio, which swoops down suddenly like a giant switchback to the Praça de Dom Pedro, the centre of the city, and then as the Rua dos Clerigos soars aloft again as suddenly to another eminence crowned by the extraordinary 25tower of the Church of the Clerigos, one of the loftiest spires in Portugal. The effect, looking up on either side from the Praça de Dom Pedro, is as curious as any streetscape of its kind in Europe. The Praça de Dom Pedro itself, crowded almost day and night with people, busy and idle, is a typical Portuguese “place,” paved, as most of them are, by the strange wave pattern in black and white stone mosaic that gives to the Praça de Dom Pedro in Lisbon (the Rocio) the English name of “rolling motion square.”

From the Praça de Dom Pedro in Oporto, leading downward towards the river-side, is the famous street of the old city called Rua das Flores, where now, as for centuries past, the gold and silver filigree jewelry for which Oporto is famous is made and sold in a score of dark old-fashioned little shops; and still farther down is the Praça do Comercio, with a striking statue amidst the flower-beds of Portugal’s national hero, Prince Henry the Navigator. In this square stands, too, the principal architectural boast of modern Oporto, the Exchange, of which the interior is really grandiose in the florid style so beloved by the 26Portuguese. The elaborate high-relief carvings prevalent in Portugal are usually executed in soft marble-like limestone, which hardens with exposure to the air; but here in the Bolsa of Oporto the intricate festoons and ingenious caprices that stand out everywhere in relief on walls, pillars, and staircases are carved out of the solid grey granite of which the edifice is built, as if out of defiance the most difficult material had been sought. Some of the fine apartments, especially the Tribunal of commerce, are beautifully decorated in frescoes by Salgado, in style much resembling those of Lord Leighton; and the great ballroom is a gorgeous hall in the brilliant gold and coloured arabesques of the Alhambra.

The Exchange is built upon the site of a disestablished Franciscan monastery, and cowering under the shadow of its modern magnificence there still stands the convent Church of St. Francis. The seventeenth century has left little of the original fifteenth-century church standing, and the interior is a mass of extravagantly rococo carved and gilt wood and other monstrosities; but in an ancient south transept chapel there is an altar-piece of interest in the style of Mantegna, 27though the sacristan ascribes it to some impossible artist of another school and century. Nothing, indeed, can equal the ignorance of, and apparent indifference to, antique and artistic objects in Portugal by the persons in charge of them. Even in national museums and historic buildings belonging to the Government, the guardians appear to have been chosen without the slightest regard to their fitness for understanding or describing the objects in their care, and the demeanour of the Portuguese people generally towards such objects is such as to force the conviction that, however proud they may be that their country has produced gems of art admired by strangers, they themselves have but a vague appreciation of their beauties or their merit.

The precipitous street leading up from the Praça de Dom Pedro to the conspicuous Church of the Clerigos is gay with a line of the drapers’ shops, with the gaudy wares aflaunt, which appeal specially to the country folk who flock in with their produce to the picturesque market of the Anjo behind the church. Red and yellow, blue and green, strive for mastery from street kerb to parapet, for the stock is as much outside 28the shops as in; and under the blazing sun, with the eternally deep azure sky overhead, the feast of colour in the clear air is so lavish as to dazzle eyes accustomed to the low tones and soft outlines of England. But relief is near. Through the chaffering market, with its piles of luscious fruit and all the bounteous gifts of earth and sea spread temptingly before brightly clad country wenches with flashing black eyes, the wayfarer may pass but need not tarry; nor is it worth his while to penetrate into the over-florid eighteenth-century churches of the Clerigos and the Carmo, which lie in his way—for just beyond them is a beautiful sub-tropical garden where shady groves of palms invite to repose, and towering planes temper the glare with a soft haze of sea-green. Seated in a quiet nook, with leisure now to watch the passers-by closely, one is struck by the prosperous busy look of the working people. There is no undue noise, and a stranger is allowed to go his way without unwelcome attention; above all, marvellous to relate, beggars are rare, whilst the persistent, offensive, mendicancy, amounting often to sheer blackmail, which is a perfect plague in Spain, is here quite unknown.

A SHOP IN OLD OPORTO.

29The manners of these people of North Portugal, indeed, are irreproachable. So courteous are they that it seems almost rude of the stranger to note too closely the quaint garb of the working people around him. The peasant women especially keep their ancient costume unchanged. Barefoot they go, old and young, with their heavy burdens piled in their boat-shaped baskets upon the black, pork-pie hats they wear. Their skirts, usually black but often with a broad horizontal stripe of colour round the bottom, are very short, and gathered with great fulness at the waist and over the hips. Upon the shoulders there is almost invariably a brilliantly coloured handkerchief, and sometimes another upon the head beneath the hat; and long, pendant, gold earrings shine against their coarse jet-black hair. It is evident that for the most part they work quite as hard as the men, but they have no appearance of privation or ill-treatment, except that their habit of carrying heavy weights upon their heads has the effect of ruining their figures in the manner already described. There are no indications anywhere of excessive drinking, and even smoking is not conspicuous amongst the 30working men and boys in the streets; they seem, indeed, too seriously busy for that, except on some feast day, when, with their best clothes on, they are gay enough, though not vociferous even then, as most southern peoples are.

There is an ancient little church in the northern suburb of Oporto, which will be of some interest to students of architecture. It is little more than a fragment now, but represents the earliest orthodox Catholic foundation in the city, and indeed in this part of the Peninsula. In the clashing of creeds in the early centuries of Christianity, Visigothic Spain had been officially Arian, whilst orthodox trinitarianism was the creed of the great churchmen, and the majority of the Romanised people. In 559 Mir, King of the Suevians, who ruled in the north-west corner of the Peninsula, was distracted by the imminent danger of his son, who was ill apparently to death. He was an Arian, but the priests of the orthodox Church assured him that safety to his son might be gained by the aid of certain relics of St. Martin of Tours, and Mir swore that if the relics worked the miracle he and all his people would join the Catholic communion, and he would build a 31church to St. Martin within a year in his capital city. The prince recovered, and Mir was as good as his word. To the dismay of the Gothic monarchs of Spain, Suevia joined the orthodox fold, and in hot haste this Church of St. Martin was built; “Cedofeita,” “soon done,” being its name to this day. The upper part of the little cruciform church has been restored and the inner walls have been lined with the universal blue and white picture tiles; but the pillars and arches are pure romanesque, with capricious carvings on the capitals, and the charming little cloister is entered by a romanesque doorway of great beauty. The capitals, too, of the north doorway of the church are very curious, though apparently later than the cloister door, one of the carvings representing a man in a long gown being devoured by an animal’s head, doubtless an allegory of which the significance is lost to us.

Another church of some interest is that of Mattosinhos, a large and prosperous village adjoining the harbour of Leixões, where those who come by sea to Oporto land. The way thither from the city by the electric tramway lies along the river-side, and past the charming tropical-looking 32public gardens at the Foz de Douro, where in the summer heat the citizens of Oporto idle, flirt, and disport themselves in the surf that breaks upon the sandy beach. The Church of Mattosinhos is a great place of pilgrimage, for it possesses amongst other attractions a miraculous image of Christ, which is venerated throughout Portugal, and the shrine is a famous one. The church lies on a gentle eminence, and is approached by a beautiful, wide, mosaic pavement, bordered by avenues of planes and cork trees, under the shadow of which are six chapels containing life-sized groups representing scenes in the passion of Our Lord. The soft warm air from the sea comes heavy-laden with the scent of flowers, and on one side of the church a grove of orange trees shelters a merry school of boys, who do not even pause in their games to glance at the curious stranger peering about amongst them. The outside of the church, somewhat squat and solid eighteenth-century work, presents a fair specimen of a style of which we shall see much later; a style not at all ineffective, although its description may not sound attractive. Its peculiarity consists in the admixture of brownish-grey granite, of which all the architectural lines and salient points consist, 33with panels or spaces of snow-white plaster between. In this pure air, under a brilliant sun, the subdued colour of the granite softens the outlines, whilst the white spaces prevent an appearance of gloom or heaviness. Inside, the Church of Mattosinhos is grave and simple in its architectural features, but, as usual, the altars, and especially the chancel, are a riotous mass of gilt wood carving, without repose or restraint.

Down by the shore the great Atlantic rollers are thundering upon the beach, as if hungering to devour the crescent-shaped sardine boats drawn higher up for safety; and a long mail steamer, in the little harbour of Leixões, has its blue peter flying and its funnel smoking ready to sail for England. It is autumn there, no doubt, for the calendar tells us so and cannot lie; but here it is glorious summer still, for the palms and planes wave softly green in the languorous air, and the flowers, in great white and purple masses, hang over every wall and wrestle with the blue-black grapes that deck the trellises before the cottage doors. Everywhere is vivid colour and sharp outline in an atmosphere of marvellous clarity, and as we are carried rapidly through the balmy, voluptuous breeze to the city, we feel that life under such conditions is indeed worth living.

II BRAGA AND BOM JESUS

The famous port-wine is grown upon a well-defined region nearly sixty miles up the river from Oporto, and, interesting as the manufacture is, the arid and inhospitable-looking land of terraced hillsides, where the glorious grape grows upon the loose, stony soil, offers little attraction to the seeker after the picturesque. To the north of Oporto, and indeed in most of the province of Minho, the wine produced, though varying in excellence, is generally of stout claret character, not unlike the Rioja wine grown in the north of Spain. But North Portugal, though cultivated like a garden wherever possible by a peasantry probably unequalled in Europe for self-respecting independence and laboriousness, thanks largely to causes that have made them practically owners as well as tillers of the soil, does not strike a cursory observer as being naturally fertile. For miles together, and as far 35as the eye reaches, pine-clad hillsides stretch: beautiful straight pines, rising in huge forests or isolated clumps, the light-green feathery foliage shining against the clear indigo background of the sky, high above the sandy soil carpeted with a thick soft cushion of pine-needles. But closer view shows that down in the sheltered valleys between the hills and on the lower slopes there nestle hundreds of little vineyards and fields of maize and rye, the staple breadstuffs of the people.

The peasantry live well in their way, and are not content with inferior food. Not for them is the poor makeshift of white bread and the fat cold bacon of the English farm hand. The bread of rye with an admixture of maize flour, the broa or brona, as it is called in north-western Spain, is dark in colour and coarse in texture; but it is a fine sustaining food, upon which, in Galicia, I have often made a good meal. The ever-present dried codfish, bacalhau, cooked with garlic and oil, and sometimes with rice, flavoured with saffron, is also not by any means a food to be contemned, unpalatable as it is to those who taste it for the first time. But this, although forming the staple fare of the Minho peasant and 36small farmer, does not exhaust his menu. There is for high days and holidays the savoury estofado of stewed meat and vegetables, of which the Portuguese peasant housewife is pardonably proud; there are olives, onions, and fruit ad libitum, and good, sound, new wine, tart, but not unpleasant, at the price of the cheapest small beer in England.

But the foreign visitor who comes simply for a short pleasure trip on the more or less beaten tracks will not be expected to regale himself upon this peasant fare, good as it is in its way. Of mutton he will find little or none, but veal, especially in the national stew, he will see at most meals, and ox-tongue, with a rich sauce, will appear on the table more frequently than is usual elsewhere. A thin, and, it must be confessed, usually tough steak, to which the adopted English name of beef (spelt bife) is given, will be placed before him pretty often, and he will find both the thing and the word omelette—which is never used in Spanish—universal in Portuguese dining-rooms.

Through a glorious country of pine-clad uplands and sheltered vineyards the railway runs from Oporto to the former great city of Braga, in Roman times Bracara Augusta, and capital of the whole north-western part of the Iberian Peninsula. 37Its position on a slight elevation in the midst of a vast undulating plain or cuenca, surrounded by mountains, has made of Braga the natural emporium of the province, and in each succeeding racial dispensation a royal seat and capital; and it remains to-day, though shorn of its splendour, the ecclesiastical capital of the Spains, claiming precedence over imperial Toledo for its archbishopric and primacy. It is a busy, prosperous place, humming with little spinning and weaving factories, where woollen and cotton fabrics are turned out in great quantities, and hold their own not only here in Minho, but in the rest of Portugal and far Brazil and Portuguese Africa.

At the railway station at Braga, in the outskirts of the city, a noisy, assertive little steam-train of several carriages is waiting in the street, and with much puffing and whistling, it carries the travellers up the slope into the narrow thoroughfares of the town. It is Sunday, and the streets are thronged with gaily-dressed people, the women, heavily decked with the ancient gold jewellery, long earrings, heavy neck chains, and crosses upon the white shirt that covers the bosom. Across the shoulders of most of them there is a brilliantly 38coloured silk handkerchief, whilst their full-pleated short skirts are usually of some thick dark-coloured cloth, and upon their heads here in Braga they often wear, like their sisters in Oporto, the peculiar round cloth pork-pie hat, with the curling silk fringe on the top of the rim. The men are less picturesque in their Sunday trim, for many of them wear felt wide-brimmed hats instead of the workaday bag cap; but even they have usually added a bit of colour to their sombre masculine garb in the form of a bright scarf encircling their waists to do the duty of braces.

Under the Porta Nova the fussy little train rushes, and up the narrow, picturesque street, the top-heavy stone scutcheon upon the eighteenth-century gate striking at the very entrance the dominant note of the ancient city. Here and everywhere the archiepiscopal insignia, the tasselled hat and mitre, and the Virgin and Child on the city arms, tell that the place from the earliest Christian times has been an ecclesiastical seignory. Churches, too, greet the eye at every turn; most of them massive seventeenth and eighteenth century structures in the peculiar style mentioned in 39the description of the Church of Mattosinhos in the last chapter: brownish grey granite outlines and salient points, with dazzling white plaster spaces between. Opposite one such church, in a tiny praça leading off from the main square of the city, the Largo da Lapa, I came across a picturesque scene worthy of the brush of John Philip. In a corner of the little square of San Francisco was an ancient recessed fountain in the wall, and around it, with water jars high and graceful like Roman amphoræ, there fluttered a group of women waiting their turn at the jet. Moving to and fro and clustering in the deep shadow contrasting with the blinding sunlight, these full-bosomed, black-haired women, with fine Roman heads and flashing eyes, were so many points of glaring colour, forming a brilliant giant kaleidoscope, whilst the chattering of many tongues, the jest and taunt thrown over the shoulder to rival or to swain, the careless laughter, seemed to blend and fill the languid air with a vague harmony to the ear, such as the mixed discordant colours in their aggregation produced to the eye. By the side of the gay fountain stood the contrast that heightened 40its effect. A frowning monastery with heavily grated windows high upon the wall, from which glowered evil faces and thrust thievish hands. For here, again, on this happy holiday afternoon in Braga, the gaol-birds held their levee. Beneath their bars stood their womenkind and children, consoling or grieving; and little bags hung down at the end of strings from the windows to receive the gifts it pleased their friends to send up to the sinister rascals, whose hoarse ribaldry or whining appeal broke in ever and anon upon the gay chatter of the fountain. As if in irony, the church that faced the monastery prison bore upon its front the name the “Temple of the Sacred Order of Penitence.” Of contrition one saw little sign on the part of those who from behind their bars looked for all their weary day upon the church commemorating the unmerited self-reproach of the “Seraphic Father St. Francis.”

THE AFTER-GLOW AT BRAGA.

There is one thing throughout Portugal that may be unhesitatingly condemned, and here in Braga the evil is as patent as elsewhere. The old traditional and, in many cases, historical names of the praças and streets have been changed wholesale and wantonly for those of 41passing and second-rate celebrities, political and otherwise. In Braga the ancient Largo da Lapa has been turned into Largo de Hintze Ribeiro, after the leader of the Liberal party in the Cortes, and there is hardly a town in Portugal in which the principal squares and thoroughfares do not bear the name of Hintze Ribeiro, or of his rival politician, Conselheiro João Franco. Serpa Pinto and Mouzinho de Albuquerque, two fire-eating African explorers, who in the jingo colonial fever of a few years ago, when the feeling against England ran high, were made heroes, are commemorated in streets innumerable throughout Portugal, to the exclusion of names which were often quaint and significant landmarks of long ago.

The palace of the Archbishops of Braga hardly corresponds in appearance with the high claims of the primate, for the church in Portugal is sadly shorn of its splendour, and part of the rambling palace is a ruin; but the cathedral offers many points of interest. Enthusiastic local antiquarians are confident that the first edifice was raised by Saint James himself in the lifetime of the Holy Virgin. But, however that may be, the present 42church certainly dates from the twelfth century; and though, as usual, the seventeenth century did its best to spoil and smother its primitive simplicity; yet, as in the case of Oporto Cathedral, which that of Braga much resembles, the stern solidity of the original work stands out clear from the frippery by which it is overlaid.

The narrow nave is divided from the aisles by massive low clustered granite pillars supporting slightly pointed arches, above which spring the simple groins that form the vaulted roof. At the west end the church is darkened by the gilt wooden ceiling that supports the choir and the great gilded organ with spread trumpet pipes that is the pride of the cathedral. The choir itself, raised upon a loft and occupying the whole west end of the church, is of surprising magnificence; carving and gilding have run wild; cupids, cherubim, angels, musicians, and fabulous monsters jostle each other exuberantly upon choir stalls, lecterns, and panels: all the caprice, skill, and invention of sixteenth and seventeenth century Portuguese art have been lavished upon the work. And the effect is rich in the extreme, but utterly 43incongruous with the sober early ogival of the church itself. Even in the nave the massive granite pillars have been crowned by later vandals with florid capitals of carved gilt wood. The walls, too, are much covered with pictorial blue and white tiles, and the effect of this, though inartistic, is quaint and not displeasing. From the tiny cloister of plain romanesque there opens the chapel of St. Luke, where in two splendid sepulchres lie the bodies of the Leonese princess, Teresa, and her Burgundian husband, Count Henrique, to whom she brought the county of Portugal in the late eleventh century. These are the progenitors of the Kings of Portugal, the parents of Affonso Henriques, of whom we shall hear much later; and to Donna Teresa is owing the re-foundation of the Cathedral of Braga. In the side chapels, in the cloisters, and in the sumptuous chapel of St. Gerald, the patron saint, there lie dead and mouldering archbishops not a few; one of them, it is said, incorrupt after eight centuries, though in consequence of the flesh having been varnished he has the appearance of a mulatto, and shows to this day the honourable scar across his 44cheek that the warrior archbishop gained whilst fighting valiantly by the side of the Master of Avis at the ever-memorable battle of Aljubarrota, that gave the regal crown of Portugal to the illegitimate scion of the House of Burgundy. Another coffin there is, just inside the west door, that has for most people a still more human interest. It is of gilt copper, apparently French in design, bearing upon its lid an effigy of a pretty boy of ten, the little Prince Affonso, whose bones lie within, and who died at Braga in the year 1400.

The exterior of the cathedral has, like the interior, been much spoilt by later builders, the little square towers having been crowned by a mean-looking balustrade and crockets; but the exterior of the sixteenth-century Lady Chapel is a favourable specimen of the peculiar florid Portuguese renaissance style called Manueline, of which I shall have more to say later. Here at the Lady Chapel at Braga it is more restrained and presents fewer daring departures from the Gothic canons than elsewhere, though the surprising intricacy of the parapet and pinnacles show that the new spirit was strongly moving when it was built. That the artists who executed the work were Spaniards 45from Biscay is probably the reason why in this instance the peculiar and more questionable features of the style are less conspicuous than in the productions of native Portuguese craftsmen of the same period. The other churches of Braga have little show. They are mostly rococo seventeenth-century structures, granite and plaster outside, and nightmares of carved gilt wood inside; but almost under the shadow of the overloaded rococo façade of Santa Cruz there is a lovely little early ogival votive chapel standing by itself, and containing a characteristically Portuguese group of the dead Christ, infinitely touching and beautiful.

And so through the quaint old streets the stranger finds his way, passing by a house here and there whose balconies and windows are covered with the intricate wooden jalousies that linger still as a tradition of oriental civilisation. The whole place is bathed and flooded with vivid sunlight, except where the lengthening shadows fall almost purple in their depth; and wandering without special aim, past the public garden called the Campo de Sant’ Anna, towards the outskirts of the city, I found myself at the foot of a steep hill rising suddenly on the left of the walk. 46Climbing it, I found a little plateau on the top with a tiny quaint seventeenth-century hermitage chapel, the Guadalupe I learned was its name, under a clump of shady planes and chestnut trees. Around the plateau was a dwarf parapet upon which two lovers were sitting, oblivious to all around save each other; but as I reached the parapet, and my eyes took in the prospect spread before me, a cry of wonderment at its marvellous beauty sprang involuntarily from me, and aroused for a moment the attention of the youth and the girl, who sat with their backs to the landscape, caring nothing for such things. It was but a glance they gave me, and I could enjoy thenceforward without interruption or notice the rapture I felt from the scene, the first of many such peculiarly Portuguese prospects of rolling valleys and soaring mountains to be gained from comparatively low elevations; scenes such as in other countries can only be attained after long and arduous climbs up high mountains. I soon found, it is true, that this view from the Guadalupe in Braga was but a trifle in comparison with many others to be encountered in the course of a few weeks’ travel; but when it first burst unexpectedly upon me it filled me with an ecstasy 47that no subsequent prospect, however fine, could produce.

Just below me was a tangle of vines, and then a mass of oaks, planes, cork-trees, and acacias, with their fluttering light foliage, descending in a gracious ocean of greenery of every shade across a broad valley till they climbed half up the glowing red mountains miles away. White houses gleamed amidst the trees, and upon every hill-top a hermitage or shrine stood out with its shining cross above it. But that which attracted the eye most was what looked like a giant white marble staircase of immense width, leading right up the side of a wooded mountain spur opposite, upon the summit of which, at the head of the stupendous stair, set deep in the verdure of woods, stood a huge white temple. Seen from the Guadalupe, the architectural approach up the mountain side to the place of pilgrimage above looked almost too vast to be made by man. Beyond, on the right, rose a majestic range of granite peaks, bare of vegetation, and scattered to the summit with tremendous boulders; and over all the setting sun threw a glow of golden light that tipped the grey granite with crimson, orange, and purple, and deepened the shadows of the climbing 48woods to umber and to black. The light fell, and by-and-by only the crests of the red and grey mountains glowed, for the woods across the vast plain lay in the black shadow of the peaks. But still, white and gleaming, like a stupendous staircase of shining silver, there shone, clear from the surrounding gloom, the great pilgrimage of Bom Jesus do Monte. And so in the gathering twilight, sated with the beauty of the inanimate world, I slowly wandered down into the pulsing city again, leaving the lad and his lass still whispering on the parapet, alone in their happy blindness.

From the door of the hotel in the Campo Sant’ Anna the tyrannical little street train that bullies Braga several times a day carries us to the foot of the Bom Jesus on the spur of Mount Espinho. For nearly two miles of continuous gentle ascent the road passes through a long stretching suburb of humble houses; and then a quarter of a mile through a close grove of shady trees brings us to the outer portico of the sanctuary, a white gateway at the head of a flight of steps, backed apparently by a dense luxuriant wood. Hard by the portico is the starting platform of an elevator railway, by which pilgrims may, if they please, 49dodge the rigours of the penance, and arrive at the summit without exertion. This course, on my arrival, commended itself to me, and I left until the next day a full exploration of the place. On the summit of the spur, by the side and behind the great church, white outlined by brown granite as usual, there lies a land of enchantment. Vegetation of surprising luxuriance is everywhere, giant trees full of verdure nearly all the year round, mosses, ferns, and flowers in every crevice. Gushing fountains and cascades, rustic bridges, and sweet winding paths through the woods, everything that can conduce to tranquil repose and comfort is here, with air so pure and exhilarating at this great elevation as to raise the most depressed to vivacity. On a picturesque little clearing on the summit there are two or three hotels, the principal of which, the Grand Hotel, a long one-storey wooden building overhung by great trees, I can vouch for as excellent.

The sanctuary is naturally a great resort amongst the people of Braga in the hot summers on the plain, and I cannot conceive a more agreeable place to pass a few days for rest at any time of the year; but the special religious element draws many devotees who conscientiously go 50through the pilgrimage to the shrines, and on the 3rd of May and Whit Sunday especially many hundreds of pilgrims flock to the sanctuary for devotion as well as for pleasure. The astonishing feature of the place is, of course, the devotional approach to the church up the side of the mountain, and it is difficult in a few words to give an idea of the eccentricity of the structure. It may be admitted at once that the taste displayed is atrociously bad, for it belongs to that eighteenth century which has loaded Portugal with rococo monstrosities; but the very vastness of Bom Jesus, and its exquisite position, save it from triviality; and looked at as a whole, either from above or below, the effect is grandiose in the extreme.

ON THE TERRACE, BOM JESUS.

Some sort of sanctuary had existed here from the fifteenth century, but it was not until the middle of the seventeenth that a miraculous figure of Christ drew to the hermitage large numbers of pilgrims, and gradually in the later eighteenth century the present structures grew under the care of successive archbishops of Braga. Standing upon the spacious open terrace before the church on the summit I looked down soon after sunrise upon the scene spread before me. 51If the view hitherward from the Guadalupe was fine this was more striking still. Wreaths of grey mist still floated in the valley far below, and the vast plain with Braga in its centre embosomed amongst trees, and surrounded as far as the eye reached with red-roofed hamlets, still lay in grey shadow. But ridge over ridge, crag beyond crag, in the background rose the mountains all tipped with shining gold with chasms of tender heliotrope; and then, before the mind had well realised the beauty of the contrast, the whole plain woke and smiled with sunshine.

The platform or terrace upon which I stood with my back to the church was flanked with granite obelisks and statues, and fronted by a wide stone parapet with a beautiful stone fountain above it. By two broad flights of steps at the sides a lower landing, or platform, was reached with an arched fountain set in the face of the wall, then by steps down to a similar platform, whence a pair of flights led to yet another, and so on, the parapets and balustrades in each case being surmounted by obelisks and statues, the fountains on the wall-faces being, like the figures, an extraordinary mixture of sacred and mythological art. 52Each alternate pair of platforms, after the first six, extending right across the structure and paved with the favourite black and white stone mosaic, was flanked by two shrines or little open chapels, each with a beautiful life-sized coloured group of figures representing scenes in the passion of our Lord. Half-way down there was an entrance from one of the platforms into a lovely old-world terraced garden, overflowing with flowers, palms, and sweet-scented verdure, and overhung by the dark yews and pines that bordered the graded descent from top to bottom. At length after descending many flights of steps and passing many terraced platforms with fountains, figures, and obelisks, a large mosaic-paved semicircular space was reached, ending in a stone parapet. Turning and looking upwards from here an extraordinary effect was presented. The alternate zigzags of the stairs and the faces of the walls, indeed all the architectural features, were outlined, like the great church towering far overhead, with brown grey granite, and faced with perfectly white plaster. Stage upon stage the great staircase rose, its parapets at the side and the centre line being marked by statues rising alternately one over the other at each 53successive stage of the ascent. Dark greenery, palms, yews, acacias, orange trees, and trailing flowers overhung the ascent on each side, and it was not difficult to understand the devotional fervour of pilgrims, who with tears and contrition toil up this vast viâ dolorosa by the hundred on the special anniversary, worshipping at the affecting shrines on the landings, and ending in an agony of remorse at the foot of the miraculous Christ which is the main attraction of the Sanctuary. Nor is the scene looking down over the parapet at the bottom of the main flight less striking. Sheer over the precipice you see the billowy masses of dark thick woods far below. On one side of the wide mosaic landing is a stair leading to another chapel, and so down by a succession of zigzag flights, bordered by thick greenery, to the porch, set in its grove of yews, and leading to the outer world. But mere words are weak to describe the charm and beauty of the Bom Jesus. There is nothing quite like it anywhere else in Europe, and as sanctuary, health resort, and architectural curiosity it deserves to be better known than it is.

ON THE HOLY STAIR, BOM JESUS.

III CITANIA AND GUIMARÃES

I drove out of Braga in the early morning. Passing over the ancient bridge spanning the little stream, at which lines of women knelt and washed their household linen, we left the city behind us and faced the mountain range beyond which lay my goal. Far above reared the grey crest of Mount Picoto, with a gilt cross dominating its highest point; and as the road wound upwards and ever upward in zigzags, at each turn of the path Braga, white and shining, set in its bed of verdure, receded far below. All around were glorious sun-kissed peaks scattered to the summit with huge granite boulders, as if the youthful Titans had there indulged in the sport of stone-throwing. Then over a hill pass, we dipped into a valley with the Falperra range clear before us, and beautiful St. Marta, with its crown of woods and its gleaming hermitage in the foreground, almost, 55as it seemed, over our heads. Maize fields spread across the valley and on the hill slopes all around us; and on the wayside, and dividing the fields, rows of oaks, chestnuts, planes, and, above all, white poplars, ran, every tree covered to the top by a trailing vine, loaded with purple grapes. The effect produced is most extraordinary, and the practice of thus utilising timber trees is peculiar to this part of the country.

For many miles, as we drove over valley and hill, tall poplars by the thousand, their light green leaves blending with the bronze, served as vine poles; and every white cottage had its shady trellis pergola before its open doorway, the great luscious bunches of fruit hanging temptingly over the heads of the women busy spinning, surrounded by quiet, brown, barefooted children.

The prevalence of granite is noticeable everywhere. The fields are divided from the path by granite walls, gate-posts, trellis standards, and even telegraph poles are slender granite monoliths, and the cottages themselves are granite built, solid and weather-proof. Many people meet us on their way to Braga: men in 56velvet jackets, wide, brown, homespun trousers, often with inserted patterns of other coloured cloth, and broad brimmed hats; the women, gay with bright kerchiefs over head and shoulders, but all barefooted, and many carrying poised upon their heads the slender red water jars, the fashion of which has known no change since the time when the legions of Augustus ruled the Celts and Suevians with iron hand from Bracara Augusta. Ox-carts slowly toil along, the bowed necks of the bullocks bearing above them the elaborately carved canga, here seen at its best. And still the road lies mainly upward through the keen pure air, the mountain slopes below and around us green with pine forests, and above us the eternal grey granite boulders. The land is bathed in a flood of sunlight, with here and there upon the widespread slopes and valleys the dark shadow of a passing cloud. Even up here amidst the masses of granite the fruit-laden vine persists, covering and embracing with its reaching tendrils poplars, oaks, and olives on the sheltered slopes, whilst the proud pines alone, towering on the exposed surfaces, defy the creeper’s insidious caress.

57At length the high pass of the Falperra range is crossed, and before us spreads a vast fertile plain, with villages and homesteads scattered across its bosom. Soon the grey boulders disappear from around us, and the air grows softer, though granite still supplies the place of wood by the roadside. The fields of maize are usually not above an acre in extent, and are bordered everywhere by vine-clad poplars. It is clear to see that the little farms are for the most part cultivated by the owners and by hand labour, for no yard of tillable soil is left to waste. It is market day at Taipas, and flocks of picturesque husbandmen and their womenkind are wending their way into the village from distant hillside hamlets and lonely granite granges. It is a gaily clad and prosperous-looking crowd that chaffer and bargain for their herds of thin porkers, their vegetables, fruit, red clay pottery, and flaring textiles; all spread out to the best advantage beneath the trees of the market-place and by the shady wayside. The women almost invariably carry upon their heads in long spacious baskets the merchandise they buy or sell, be it live-stock, produce, yarn for weaving, or household stuff; 58and as invariably is the burden covered with a snowy cloth, and the woman herself is clean, well-fed, and upstanding.

Taipas, the famous thermal mineral baths of the Romans, did not detain me except to order lunch to be ready when I should return a few hours later to the primitive inn attached to the ancient baths, for I was bound for a place still more ancient than Roman Taipas, the mysterious buried city of Citania, the Portuguese Pompeii.

A few miles’ drive upon an excellent road and through a prosperous smiling country of maize, vines, and olives, brought me to the tiny hamlet of São Estevão de Briteiros, just a humble little grey church, a large farmhouse, an inn, a few cottages and a school. The road had led almost at right angles to that by which we had reached Taipas, and the Falperra range, which we had crossed earlier in the day, again loomed nearer; the nearest spur, a bold hill of nine hundred or a thousand feet high at some distance from the range, projecting far out into the plain, and rising precipitously from the little village of Briteiros, which was the present limit of my drive. Long before we reached it the abrupt hill with its tiny white hermitage chapel of São Romão on the highest point had stood out conspicuously, and seen from below looked impossible of ascent. From Briteiros, however, the climb was seen to be not so formidable; for a rough path started from behind the humble schoolhouse, through little farmsteads, gradually winding and zigzagging up the precipitous slope through the trees and brushwood that clothed the lower portion of the hill. The population of Briteiros were mostly at Taipas for the market, and a demand for the services of um rapaz, a boy, to guide the stranger to the lost city of long ago met with the reply that no man nor boy was readily available.

ON THE WAY TO MARKET, TAIPAS.

59After some short delay an aged woman produced a substitute in the form of an elfin little maiden of ten or eleven, with great black eyes, half-bashful, half-bold, and jet black hair floating unrestrained over her shoulders. With her bare feet and scanty floating raiment she skipped like a dryad from stone to stone over the rugged pathway, looking back now and again as if in wondering contempt at the lumbering stranger slipping and floundering after her upon the thick carpet of pine needles that clothed the spaces between the boulders forming the track. 60Track it was and no more, scarped on the hillside, and evidently had been made by hands; for the stones still showed some signs of regularity and the larger masses had been removed to the side, whilst those which stood upon the causeway itself proved by their flat and polished surfaces that ages of human feet had passed over them up and down the hill. As the weird little damsel sprang with the free action of a wild thing from stone to stone, her black hair floating in the pine-scented breeze, it was easy for me to imagine how the people who long, long ago, before history records, had dwelt upon this hill and made this causeway had looked and moved. Racial inundations had passed over the land since then, leaving traces perhaps in this or the other type of the countryside, but the girl’s far-off ancestors, dwelling always upon the same spot, had struck deeper and more lasting root than their stone walls and causeways, and as the little guide flittered up the rough climb before me, the ages seemed to fall away and the dim past to grow in clearness.

Half up the hill the trees cease, and the stony causeway rises precipitously through a region of purple heather, broom and yellow gorse, thickly 61strewn with giant granite boulders. Presently the ruins of a wall of rough stones cemented together stretch across right and left; and running parallel, and just inside of it, a dry water channel well made of hewn stones. The ground-plans and walls a yard or two high, of houses are on all sides of us; and climbing a little higher and turning the shoulder of the hill we see spread before us, covering the whole of the south upper slopes of the declivity, a vast stretch of uncovered ruins—a once-populous town of the unrecorded past.

Before describing in detail these, by far the most complete and interesting Celtiberian remains in the Peninsula, a few words may be said with regard to the discovery and exploration of them, as well as to the theories as to their origin. For reasons which need not be re-stated here the Celtic element was less intimately mixed with the Iberian in the north-western part of the Peninsula than elsewhere, and the tribes in this part of the country were those which withstood longest the imposition of the Roman bureaucratic system after the assassination of the patriot Viriatus, and the fall of Numancia in the second century B.C. Not till the time of the great Julius did the 62legionaries, stationed then permanently at Braga, sweep all this province clean of revolt, and bring the tribesmen to their knees after dire slaughter and destruction. The Celtiberian tribes in this remote corner had lived their simple pastoral lives from time unrecorded in small family clans, each independent, with its own law and its own gods; but for purposes of mutual defence in later times confederations of many clans were formed, mòr thuatha, as in Ireland. Each of these confederations possessed a fortified centre or stronghold as a place of assembly and refuge, usually upon an eminence, wherein the scattered clans might meet for defence or in council to treat of common interests. The Roman historian, Valerius Maximus speaks especially of some such fortress upon a mountain in Lusitania, and praises its inhabitants for their stubborn bravery. He calls it by the name of Citania, and antiquaries have given to the extensive ruins now before us that name during the last few years, on the assumption that this may be the place referred to by the Roman chronicler.

Vague stories had always pervaded the countryside of buried ruins, with the accompanying legends of witches, warlocks, and enchanted 63Moors existing upon the hill of São Romão; and in the eighteenth century the curate of São Estevão de Briteiros at the foot of the hill had brought down from the hill-top and placed in his church porch a great mysterious slab of stone covered with mystic devices and of strange fashioning. But not until our own times did a man come with public spirit enough to devote his life and small fortune to the exploration of this city of the past, for in Portugal public encouragement of any such objects is rare indeed. This man was Dr. Sarmento, who for many years until his death recently, made a labour of love in uncovering systematically the vestiges of the prehistoric city.

All over the plain, for many miles around, the ruins of Celto-Roman villages have been found, and in many cases partially explored by Dr. Sarmento and others; the objects discovered, like those found in Citania, having been deposited in the museum at Guimarães belonging to the explorer, but in consequence of his death henceforward to be a public institution subsidised by the State. As I shall point out when I describe my visit to the museum, the objects unearthed at Sabroso, St. Iria, and other neighbouring places 64are immensely more numerous than those from Citania itself; great masses of coins, personal ornaments, arms, inscriptions, and utensils in the museum proving that these places existed far into Roman times, and perhaps much later. The chaotic condition of the Sarmento collection at present, and the apparent absence of any skilled and enthusiastic guardianship, have probably been a reason why certain investigators have attributed to Citania many objects discovered elsewhere, and have founded upon them theories which must necessarily be misleading. Dr. Hübner, who did not see the place personally, aroused the wrath of Dr. Sarmento in this way, and other archæologists have spoken somewhat loosely as to the nature of the finds in the Citania excavations. The great interest of the hill stronghold, indeed, consists in the fact that we have here practically an unspoilt Celtic or Celtiberian town, in which Roman civilisation had but little part. It will be seen by the objects actually unearthed that the place was inhabited after the Roman influence and language had dominated the district, as late, indeed, as the time of Hadrian; but of purely Roman remains, so plentiful elsewhere in the district 65there are in Citania hardly any; the construction and plan of the houses having much in common with the Irish and Scotch Celtic cashels, and the absence of all indications of Christianity being complete.

Following a well-paved causeway of some seven or eight feet wide, the flat stones of which have been worn smooth by countless generations of forgotten footsteps, we can perceive perfectly the ground plan of the houses on each side. In most cases Dr. Sarmento has excavated down to the stone-laid flooring of the houses inside, and to the base of the masonry outside; and it is possible to wander through the main lanes or streets of the town, crossing each other at right angles here and there, and interspersed by little circular paved open spaces, and to reconstruct in the mind’s eye the primitive life of this city of long ago. Here, for instance, just inside the wall by which we entered is a little square house, some twelve feet wide, containing two rough millstones, of which many have been found. The walls are of huge, rough stones, evidently taken as they came and fitted together with small stones where necessary to fill in interstices, the whole cemented together 66by some hard rubbly compost. Running past this building and through the town (in one or two cases, indeed, through the houses themselves) is one of the several stone water channels protected by low walls on each side, and supplied in ancient times by the springs that still gush out plentifully on the hillside.

Some of the houses are much larger, and must have contained two or more apartments. But what strikes the eye of the observer most is the relatively large number of purely circular edifices, and this it is that has mainly attracted the speculations of archæologists. Mr. Oswald Crawford, who went over the place whilst the excavations were in their earlier stages many years ago, was mistaken in his estimate that the round buildings were eight or nine times more numerous than the square, and he founded upon this and other data the opinion that the whole place was a great granary, where the food of the tribes might be stored in safety. So far from the round houses being eight times as numerous as the square, found at least four square houses to every one round; but that which struck me as most curious, and so far as I could learn, it had not specially attracted the attention of previous visitors, was 67that in a large number of cases the round houses were enclosed in a square or angular walled space, not very much larger than the circle, but leaving a passage of some two feet wide, in most cases on the right-hand side, between the two walls, leading to a space at the back between the circular wall and the wall of the square enclosure, the left-hand side of the circular wall being mostly built to touch the square wall on that side. Dr. Sarmento was of opinion that the space thus formed was for the purpose of sheltering cattle and domestic animals, and says that he had found some rough stone excavations like troughs in them, with, in one or two cases, a ring in the wall as if to tether beasts. The width of the entrance passage and the extent of the enclosed space in the rear of the circle would be too small to admit any large animal; but probably goats would be housed in them easily. In one or two cases I noted that the stone post forming a jamb to the entrance to the passage between the round house and the square enclosure was grooved on the inner surface. This in Dr. Sarmento’s opinion proved that the entrance to the passage was closed by a lifting hatch of wood, which to some extent confirms the idea that the back space was intended 68to shelter animals such as goats, as a lifting door set in a groove would be much less likely to be forced by them than a swing door turning, as the house door did, on wooden pegs.

There are very few instances of party walls being utilised for two adjoining houses, though the buildings are often only a few inches apart. Even in the case of the round houses enclosed in square spaces and touching the square wall, the circular structure is quite complete at the point of contact. In one instance I measured a large walled parallelogram fronting on the principal causeway, seventeen yards in length, enclosing within it one square house of nine yards wide, and two circular houses, one on each side, the structures in each case being complete, but the circular walls in this instance merged for a few inches only at the point of contact with the square outer wall at the side. Whether these square or outer enclosures were tiled or were merely enclosed yards it is difficult to say, but that the houses themselves were so covered is evident from the immense number of well-made red shards scattered everywhere, and particularly inside the houses, the tiles being turned up at each end, so that a concave tile to cover over the joint between 69them would make a roof covered with them quite watertight. A door jamb and lintel in one house showed a well-carved rope moulding, but in most cases they were plain, the lintels and doorsteps containing, however, at the side a square-cut hollow, in which a block of wood was apparently inserted to receive the wooden peg or pivot which formed a sort of hinge for the door, an arrangement still adopted for the doors of barns, &c., in the neighbourhood; though Dr. Sarmento was of opinion that no wood was employed in the construction of the houses themselves, the polished rounded stones fixed to the walls in some of the houses, which Dr. Hübner considered to be bases of pillars, being in the opinion of the Portuguese archæologist seats for the inhabitants.

The round houses are usually about fourteen feet in diameter, and the walls remaining rarely rise above four or five feet from the surface. The doorstep is usually raised a foot or so above the level of the ground. One round house has been tentatively rebuilt by Dr. Sarmento on the level space on the top of the hill, an unattractive beehive-looking structure without windows, but later investigation convinced 70him that he had built it too high; and that it should not be of so great an elevation as the measure of its diameter. The principal thoroughfares running transversely on the slope of the hill are carefully walled upon the scarped inner side, and in some cases the stone water channel runs alongside of it.

On reaching the bare space at the very summit of the hill, upon which the little modern Christian chapel stands, a good idea may be formed of the whole plan of the place. The town, covering perhaps five or six acres, all lies over the crest and down the south and south-west slopes. The wall by which we entered from the south is apparently the inner wall of three, and practically encloses the top of the hill and the centre of the town on the slope. The second wall, which shows signs of a moat, is of greater extent, following the irregular contour of the hill, whilst the third or outer defence extends far down almost to the plain on the west and south-west side; traces of buildings, although but little explored, being very abundant between the two inner walls on the south and south-west, and clearly defined paths leading down from the main city to the outer defences and the 71suburbs. In consequence of the formation of the ground, attack was to be looked for mainly from the most accessible point, namely, the north-east; for here the three lines of defences are almost close together, and each of the walls is here brought to a rough angle. From the apex of the outer wall on this side there are indications of another defence running straight out at right angles along the saddle which connects the hill with an outlying spur easy of approach, and at the end of this long projection there appears to have been two parallel horizontal outworks running across the end of the saddle, this being the vulnerable point of the fortress.

It is easy to imagine how almost impregnable such a place could be made. The hill at any other point than this could only be scaled, if at all, with the greatest difficulty, and the huge boulders on its side would enable even weak defenders under their cover to hurl down stones or spears upon an advancing foe. The south side of the hill is the least accessible of all for any considerable body, and there the defences are the most distant and the weakest.

In the midst of the ruined town I found a bright intelligent peasant lad, busy arranging 72fragments of pottery upon a stone for the later inspection of some one in authority; and from him I heard much quaint and simple local folklore. His own interest was greatest in what he called the cemetery, four or five small grave-like troughs, about three or four feet long and a foot deep, neatly made and lined with dressed stone slabs. The so-called graves lie close to the causeway and amongst the houses, in an irregular group, and can hardly have been sepulchral, considering their size and position; Dr. Sarmento inclining to the belief that they were troughs for feeding cattle. The cemetery, if there be any, would probably lie far down the slope outside the second, perhaps outside the outer, wall, but here no excavation of any importance has been executed. At some little distance down have been found three perfectly plain dolmens of the usual shape, which are usually sepulchral; and doubtless extensive exploration around them would reveal human remains. My peasant friend was also much concerned in a mysterious “mine,” as it is called, from which he assured me, in awe-stricken tones, that enchanted Moors came at night and carried evil over the plain. It is supposed that this cave, which is of no great 73extent, some two yards in diameter at the mouth, and a few yards deep, was adjoining or under the place where the great slab which the country-people call Pedra Formosa, the handsome-stone, to which I shall revert presently, was found.

I have mentioned that Mr. Crawford was of opinion that the round houses were granaries, but seeing that the Celts of Ireland and Scotland frequently built and lived in round houses within their cashels, and bearing in mind the existence of the spaces for animals, which I have described as attached to those of Citania, I am strongly of opinion that, comfortless as they appear, these were the veritable dwellings of many of the neolithic folk who for centuries held their foes at bay upon this headland jutting out upon the rich plain of Guimarães. Still another solution of the round-house problem is, as I understand his words, suggested by my friend Professor Altamira in his Historia de Espana y de la Civilization espanõla. The earlier generations of this people, he says, buried their dead under dolmens which when covered were circular; and later generations retained the tradition of circular sepulchres. “They were built round,” he says, “with a sort of domed roof, the middle of which 74was supported by a pillar of wood or stone. Some of such tombs had passages (or galleries) to enter by—which was frequently the case also with the dolmens—and some had lateral chambers.... Of this class are those discovered at Citania, on the hill of San Roman in Portugal.” Apart from the fact that no human remains have been found in these round houses at Citania, there is no sepulchral suggestion about them. They are, it is true, if Dr. Sarmento be right, windowless and rough, but the comparison must not be made with the dwellings of to-day, but with the haunts of cave men, who had been the progenitors of the early settlers of Citania; and judged by that standard, these stout, weather-proof, stone houses, with doors and an enclosed separate space behind for cattle, were almost luxurious. In any case, a close examination of them left in my mind no doubt at all that they had been the dwellings of human creatures in the earlier stages of civilisation.

It required no great effort of the imagination to people the narrow paved paths on the hillside and the little round central spaces with the dwellers in these rough abodes: wild-looking, shaggy men, with long hair, and clad in skin or 75rough woollen garments, going about their daily toil as hunters, husbandmen, potters, or smiths, to paint to oneself the alarm of an approaching foe, the savage warfare to repel attack, and finally the victorious host of Roman legionaries of Augustus levelling the poor homes, slaughtering, ravishing, destroying, until the poor remnant of the vanquished knelt in the dust and bowed their necks evermore to the yoke of discipline and civilisation.

The place continued to be the abode of men long afterwards, for Latin became the speech of some people who lived there, and coins as late as Tiberius and one of Hadrian (117 A.D.) have been unearthed at Citania; but with the Roman officers supreme at Braga, and the whole plain prospering and smiling under the arts of peace and Roman luxury, poor Citania on its bold hill-top lost its reason for existence, and must have dwindled, until long before the time of the Goths and Suevians all men forgot it, and the ages covered it with the mantle of earth, undisturbed till now.

But whilst I am thus speculating, my little girl guide is getting restless, and the westerly tending sun tells me that I have long outstayed the appointed time when I was to return to Taipas. 76So, reluctantly, and with my brain full of idle fancies which made me dream of creatures such as those I have pictured lurking behind the thick-strewn boulders, and challenging my intrusion upon their stronghold, I slowly paced the paved lanes again through the lines of stark ruined walls, and so out upon the precipitous hillside down to Briteiros, where the carriage awaited me in the grateful shade.

The market people were homeward bound from Taipas now; the women with their purchases or unsold wares swaying rhythmically upon their heads as they walked, and the men leading live stock or bent beneath burdens, but never too heavily laden to prevent them from courteously saluting the passing stranger. The inn, nearly empty of bathing visitors now that the summer was past, was feverishly anxious to do its best; and, though Citania had detained me for hours longer than I had reckoned, Taipas contrived to offer me a tolerable lunch, the first meal I had eaten in that long day of delight. Upon a wall of the open courtyard before the inn is an ancient fountain with a pompous poetical inscription, setting forth that John I. of Portugal, Para que a morte mais tropheos não conte, “that death should no 77more trophies boast,” had raised this miraculous fountain of healing water. But John I. was a mere modern in these ancient thermes; for here the great Hadrian was cured of his malady, and founded the sumptuous baths, of which extensive remains have in recent times been discovered, but not explored to any extent. In a field nearly opposite the inn is an enormous block of granite, upon which a long Roman inscription tells that this work was erected by the orders of the Imperial Cæsar Trajan, son of Nerva, conqueror of the Germans, and much more to similar effect; whilst upon another face of the block an interminable list of modern Portuguese names of gentlemen interested in the rehabilitation of the baths in recent times shows the universal hankering after immortality in company with the great felt by the little men of the world.

The bathing establishment itself is primitive enough, consisting of about twenty baths large and small, in separate wooden compartments, built round three sides of a square, the temperature of the water being about 85° Fahr., very abundant, clear, and bright, and with a strong sulphureous taste and smell. The waters are said to be extraordinarily efficacious in cutaneous affections, 78maladies of the mucous membranes, laryngitis, bronchitis, and rheumatism, and as many as 1500 patients visit them from May to September every year, the flow of water being a quarter of a million litres a day.

All the way from Taipas to Guimarães the road lay through maize fields bordered thickly by vine-covered poplars; a prosperous land of well-fed, laborious people. Near the ancient city, the birthplace of the Portuguese monarchy, the ground rises, and the pine forests spread for miles on the uplands all around, the fresh sweet scent of the woods adding one more sensuous joy to a closing day of incomparable loveliness. As the carriage clattered over the cobble stones, through the narrow streets of the town, and so into the beautiful alameda and the public garden, in which the principal hotel stands, there rose as if from the end of the alameda the giant granite peak of the Penha, all glorified and transfigured by the setting sun. The mountain, almost sheer as seen from this side, seemed to tower right overhead: green woods clothed its sides up the greater part of its height, and then, like a wall, sprang a precipice of bare scarred rock, now orange and purple against a violet sky. On the summit of 79the apparently inaccessible saw edge of the peak stood out the white walls of a building, which may have been a hermitage, but I am told is now a guest-house, where in the most torrid summer the citizens of Guimarães find cool breezes and refreshment. As I gazed, entranced at the changing colours of the sunset on the peak—orange deepening to crimson and to bronze, purple fading by soft degrees to slaty-blue, and the rose-pink of the growing after-glow softening the rugged outlines with tender light—there came the clanging of an acolyte’s bell, and across the alameda there wound a devout little procession bearing the Host, with flaring tapers, swinging censers, priests, and choristers. It was the one note needed to complete the picture. Guimarães in the gathering twilight took me back in one happy moment to the ages long ago, when simple faith unbroken reigned, and all was beautiful and all was true.

Guimarães has a proper pride in itself, and boldly asserts its claim to be not only one of the most ancient, but the most glorious and prosperous city in Portugal.

80sings the poet, but the pride of Guimarães extends far beyond this boast. Seated in the centre of the province of Minho, in the very garden of Portugal, with abundant streams and fertile valleys for miles round, protected by the mountains on each side that enclose the plain from inclement winds, the town is in an ideal situation. Forming, as it did in old times, one of the fiefs of the left-handed royal house of Braganza, that made the dukes richer than the king, one of the legitimate Infantes is said to have exclaimed jealously, as he looked down upon the rich domain, Quem te deu não te via; se te vira não te dera, “he who gave thee never saw thee; if he had seen thee he would not give thee,” and one of the greatest of Portuguese writers, Manoel de Faria, speaking of Guimarães said: “If the Elysian fields ever existed on earth it must have been here, and if they did not exist they should have been created in order to place them here.” But another subject of pride, and an article of faith with all good citizens of the town, is that Guimarães possesses the most beautiful women in Europe. Personally I must confess that they did not strike me as being more comely than their sisters of the rest of North Portugal, especially 81of Braga and Coimbra, but from ancient times the women of Araduca, the modern Guimarães, were held to be pre-eminent, and it is too late now to gainsay it, confirmed as it is by writers Portuguese and French innumerable.

In any case, the city is as beautiful as it is historically interesting. Here on the site of the ruined ancient town of Celts and Romans, a Leonese princess, in the tenth century, founded the great Benedictine house, around which the mediæval town gradually grew. But its principal glory began when Count Henrique of Burgundy and his royal Leonese bride, Teresa, came to govern Portugal as Count, for his father-in-law, Alfonso VI., the friend and foe of the Cid. Here at Guimarães in the splendid castle, even now sturdy in its dismantlement, the first Count of Portugal held his court, and here his great son, Affonso Henriques, the national hero and first king, was born in 1109 and passed his youth.

It is impossible to imagine a ruin more stately than that of the grand mediæval castle which, upon a gentle eminence on the outskirts, dominates the town. Granite built upon a granite base, the walls sharp and clear to-day, look as if cut but nine years ago instead of nine centuries. 82Here is the dignity of age without its feebleness. A vast battlemented outer wall, with corner bastions and pointed crenellations, surrounds the majestic keep, the monolithic battlements of which, huge single stones, stand uninjured still by time or the more destructive hand of man. The cyclopean masses are reddened now by lichen and stained by weather, but nine centuries have failed to crumble them, and they stand a splendid monument of the first of the two outstanding epochs in Portuguese history, when the nation was stirred with vast ambitions and endowed with heroic energy to fulfil them. Affonso Henriques of Guimarães was the protagonist of the first epoch, that of national independence; Prince Henry the Navigator, the protagonist of the second, that of national expansion.

Guimarães is delightful, and an artist might spend a month in its quaint streets and alleys without exhausting the “bits” that call for delineation. One charming old-world corner is the square in which stands the church that alone remains of the vast monastery founded by the Leonese Princess Munia—the Collegiada the townspeople call it, although I believe it bears officially another name. The early florid 83Gothic tower is a beautiful one, and more beautiful still the detached rood canopy at its west end, with its quaint mixture of early Gothic with Greek and Byzantine ornament. Opposite this is the low-arched sixteenth-century arcade beneath the town-hall, and the houses that surround the irregular little praça are in picturesque keeping with the rest. There is in a street called Largo dos Trigães, one of the finest stretches of crenellated wall that ever I saw. It must be three hundred yards long, and at least five-and-twenty feet high, independent of its pointed battlements, and is in the most perfect preservation though many centuries old. It is said to enclose the grounds of a disestablished monastery, for Guimarães was in old times monastic or nothing.

But curious and interesting as Guimarães is, I was not drawn thither mainly to see the town, but to examine in the Sarmento museum the objects discovered in the excavation of Citania. The collection is at present in a state of chaos, which may possibly be remedied when the reconstruction of the house is completed by the authorities. The number of objects is immense, though by far the greater part of them came 84from other places in the neighbourhood than Citania, and are mainly attributable to the Roman period, though many of them are very early and ante-Christian. The few purely Roman objects, however, found at Citania are neither peculiar to the place nor of special interest. What is far more attractive to the student are the relics that exist of the real and original Celtiberian makers of the hill town.

First of all is the famous Pedra Formosa, to which reference has been made. It stands at present in the open at the back of the Sarmento house, but protected from the weather by a low roof which unfortunately prevents a photograph being secured of it. It is a thick slab of granite, seven feet long by nine feet wide, and notwithstanding the contention of Dr. Hübner, who has not seen it, I am convinced that, whatever may have been its purpose, its position was intended to be horizontal, and that it is not a sepulchral stone to be set on edge. At present it is mounted on four low posts or pillars, like a table, and the elaborate carving upon it can be consequently seen plainly. At the top of its shorter diameter in the centre is a hollow, ending in a point, the outer circumference of 85the hollow being about the size of a human head. From this, extending downwards about six feet to a semicircular gap cut into the stone, at the foot is a raised cord-like pattern cut out of the thickness of the stone, beneath which is bored a tunnel, or channel, leading from the point of the hollow cone at the top down to a hole through the stone at the bottom, a few inches from the semicircular gap. From the base of the hollow at the top, leading obliquely to the sides, are two other raised cord-like ridges similar to that from top to bottom; the main design being roughly that of a human being with the hollow for the head, the straight cord from top to bottom for the body and legs, and the oblique cords for the arms. The whole of the spaces between the cords are filled with a most intricate series of designs, beautifully incised in the stone, concentric whorls, curves, and scrolls being in each case the main motive.

Whatever may have been the purpose of the stone—religious, sacrificial, or tribal—the work must have occupied many men for a long period, and the skill, both of design and execution, prove that the artificers must have 86reached a relatively high stage of artistic development. The art is obviously ante-Christian, and the form of the stone suggests that it may have been sacrificial, with the hollow cone to receive the blood from a severed jugular and the tunnel beneath the central cord to convey it to where the priest stood in the gap to catch it as it ran through the hole at the bottom of the stone. The incised design shows no indication of Greek or Roman influence, but the concentric curves are identical with some of the earliest ornamental decoration of the stonework in the museum brought from other Celto-Roman places in the neighbourhood, and also with the decoration upon Celtic pottery found elsewhere in Portugal and at Carmona in Spain.

87

A stone of great interest found also at Citania may perhaps add more to our knowledge than the mysterious Pedra Formosa. It bears an inscription in the Celtiberian character, of which comparatively few specimens have hitherto been discovered, and no key has been found to decipher them. One of those known and reproduced by Dr. Hübner was found at Peñalba de Castro in Spain, and appears to be nearly identical in character with that from Citania; whilst another, also in Hübner, brought from Barcelona, presents several important differences. The Citania inscription is here reproduced, and I am indebted to Professor Rhys, the famous Celtic authority, for an interesting suggestion, namely, that the whole inscription, although written in the unknown Celtiberian character, may be intended to be read in Latin; in which case the first line and a half might represent Syatenunius. This point, however, I must leave as being too abstruse for a book of this kind. We are on firmer ground in the case of the very numerous specimens of red pottery found at Citania and stamped with a mark entirely unknown elsewhere. The marks of Roman potters on jars and pitchers were always printed 88in small letters outside the mouth, whereas the marked pieces in question from Citania bear in letters an inch long inside the mouth “Camal” or “Arg,” and sometimes both words, and scores of red tiles have also been found similarly marked ARG
CAMAL. Upon a lintel-stone from Citania in the museum I read the words CORONERI CALI DOMUS, and another, apparently from the same house, is mentioned by Dr. Sarmento, but which I did not see, bearing the inscription CRON CAMALI DOMUS, most of the pottery bearing Camal’s name having been found near this house. Whether Camal was a Celto-Roman potter, or, as seems much more likely, a great personage or chief of Citania, is a point yet to be decided; but from the fact that the name on the clay vessels is not situated where the potter’s mark is usually inscribed, would tend to the belief that he was the owner rather than the manufacturer. Arg, or Airg, as it may be read, may have represented a Celtiberian title or dignity, and Camal, or Camalus, is undoubtedly a Celtic name. It is unlikely, moreover, that if Camal had simply been a potter his son Coronerus would have considered it necessary to record upon his stone door-lintel the fact of his 89descent, which he probably would have done if his father Camalus was a person of consequence. Another peculiar fact in connection with the incised ornamentation upon stones at Citania is the repetition of the Swastick or wheeled cross and the wheeled whorl, which are of pre-Christian and oriental origin, this design being also quite frequent in the objects found in other places in the neighbourhood, and amongst Celtic remains in other parts of the Peninsula.

The death of Dr. Sarmento has, of course, put an end to his self-sacrificing life-task, leaving by far the greater part of the exploration of the outer zones of Citania unattempted. It is almost too much to hope that any other similarly public-spirited Portuguese will provide the funds needed for the purpose, for there is little enthusiasm for such subjects in the country; but if funds could be obtained to excavate extensively the lower slopes of the hill on the south side where numerous hillocks suggest that sepulchral remains may lie beneath, it is probable that discoveries of great importance in Celtiberian civilisation would be made, and perhaps the riddle of the Celtiberian alphabet solved.

IV BUSSACO

After losing sight of the marvellous view across the river of the city upon its amphitheatre of hills, the road from Oporto towards the south runs through a country of drifting sands parallel with the seashore. Pines bending away from the prevailing westerly wind stand singly and in clumps at first, and then in vast tracts, as in the Landes about Arcachon, binding the unstable soil together; and within a few miles of Oporto here and there a sea-bathing village of châlets and houses of entertainment breaks the monotony of the scene. It was but seven in the evening, but the autumn day had already sunk into dusk with an angry streaked black and crimson after-glow when I came to the little thermal bathing village of Luzo, on the lower slopes of the mountains that cover the whole of the north of Portugal except the strip of country bordering the sea. For some miles, ever since we had left the main railway 91line from Oporto to Lisbon at Pampilhosa junction, we had been rising, whilst the pines bordering the line had been growing thicker and more sturdy, and from Luzo onward the way grew still steeper. The stars shone brightly, but a dew almost as heavy as rain was falling as the carriage that had met me at the station drawn by two gigantic mules, rattled along the excellent road through Luzo.

There is always a feeling of uncanniness in speeding through an unknown town at night for the first time. Here at Luzo little white cottages flashed past us, a dim light flickered before a shrine at a street corner, a man dimly visible tinkled a bandurra a by the side of a grated window, little groups whispered mysteriously in the semi-darkness: they were all shadows to me, whilst I, poor waif, to them was nothing, for the clatter of the mules and the rattle of the carriage over the cobble stones were the only signs they had of the momentary presence of a man who, like a ship passing in the night, flitted in the darkness through the village which to them was life and death and all things. Our road lay ever upward. By the dim light of a waning moon one could see the trunks of great pines close together, and 92the soft moist air was heavily charged with the grateful balsamic scent of the trees. As we toiled patiently upward and still upward, in the darkness of the night the hush of the woods fell deeply upon us, for no breath of wind stirred the lofty tops that closed over us like an arch, and the summer night-birds had already taken flight farther south. Presently we passed through what in the dimness looked like an imposing architectural gateway set in a high wall, and then the wood grew perceptibly denser. By the wayside the bank on the left rose sheer from the road covered with verdure, and one felt rather than saw that up and up, as it seemed infinitely, the great trees towered higher and higher upon the steep slope, whilst on the right hand the huge eucalyptus trunks shining white through the blackness of the night, stood upon the brink of a precipitous drop, from which emerged now and again tree tops and a tumult of vegetation that showed, even though one saw but little of it, that we were in the midst of a luxuriant forest such as those I have seen on the Amazon and in Brazil, but never before in Europe.

Presently we drove into a circle of light, and one of the surprises of my life burst upon me. 93A palace so stately and beautiful, so new and spotless withal, as to seem like a scene from a fairy tale. But no—this flashing white dream in stone is no scenic illusion; the carved tracery, like petrified lace, and leaves, and branches, infinite in caprice and variety, the lovely cloistered terrace, the monumental staircase, and the almost insolent wealth and intricacy of sculptured ornament, are all solid chiselled stone, and this splendid royal castle in the most wondrous wood in Europe is an ordinary hotel, or rather an extraordinary one run on ordinary lines.

The first instinct of a traveller when he lights upon such a find as this is to keep it to himself rather than diminish his enjoyment in the possession of his secret by sharing it with others; but Bussaco is big enough, and it would be ungenerous to hide it. It was built by the Portuguese Government, it is said, for a royal residence, and is hardly yet quite finished, for an annexe is now being constructed for the use of the royal family during their summer sojourn, and some of the frescoes in the main castle are still to be added; but it is difficult to understand—unless the intention really was, as stated, to make the place a permanent royal residence—the 94reason for spending the vast sums of money that the place must have cost upon a house of public entertainment. However, there it stands, with its stately tower, its majestic carved staircase, and all its heraldic blazonry, in the midst of a crown domain seized from a Carmelite monastery, probably the most beautiful hotel in Europe, certainly by far the best in the Peninsula; in an exquisite climate, with perfect sanitation and water, a good white wine grown on its own hillside, a cuisine with which no fault can reasonably be found, cleanliness, and order; a Swiss lessee who speaks English fluently and understands English needs, a bill of almost disconcerting moderation ... and the woods! For, after all, the hotel-palace, the golf-links, the tennis-lawn, the ballroom, and all the rest of the added attractions of the place, are but subsidiary incidents to the terrestrial paradise that surrounds it, enclosed in its high granite wall six miles in circumference.

Manueline Architecture at the Hotel, Bussaco

It was night when the gleaming salt-white palace first flashed upon me out of the darkness, but when I opened my shutters as the dawn was breaking the next morning, and stepped out upon the wide battlements of the castle, the scene 95before me was so wonderful as to force from me an involuntary prayer of praise and thankfulness to God that so much of beauty should be vouchsafed to my senses. Below and around me for miles on all sides stretched the woods, woods such as I have seen nowhere else in Europe, though the private gardens and plantations of Cintra and Monserrat approach them in luxuriant fertility. Great palms and towering cedars of Lebanon grow side by side with oaks of giant bulk: oranges and fig-trees, cork and acacia, maple, birch, and willow stand beneath the straight eucalyptus, “tall as the mast of some great admiral”: araucarias spread their spiny branches with a luxuriance never seen at home, and mosses, ivy, and ferns clothe thickly every inch of ground, every bank, and even the time-worn stones, that all around testify to the existence of dwelling here long before the white palace raised its tall tower over the darkening wood.

Beyond the trees, on the fair morning I first beheld the scene, the shadow of twilight still lingered in the valleys and the horizon was veiled in mist, but already the sun was touching the mountain-tops all around. One range after another caught the golden light, and as far as the 96vision reached mountain succeeded mountain like mighty waves suddenly stayed in their onward sweep and turned into rosy rock. Here and there amidst the greenery, far below upon the plains, a white cottage, or the clustered red roofs of a village lit up the picture with a note of emphasis, and the sweet, cool air of the mountains, fresh with the scent of pine, eucalyptus, and wild flowers innumerable, came to the jaded town-dweller like a foretaste of some exquisite new sense to endow mankind in a fuller life to come.

Straight before me, as I stood upon the battlements looking towards the south, there rose as it seemed quite close a steep mountain slope clothed with a mass of verdure so thick as to look like a solid billowy surface of every tint of green, from tender primrose to deepest bronze. Here and there a straight pine or cedar, more lofty than its fellows, caught with its feathery top a glinting sun-ray and held it, whilst high up, almost overhead, upon a rocky spur emerging from the foliage there stood a humble hermitage, and on the very summit, looking so inaccessible that no human foot could reach it, a little white tower of another hermitage reared its cross over all.

FROM THE BATTLEMENT, BUSSACO.

97On the right hand, as one looked down over the battlements, the pretty gardens of the palace, with flowers and palms, are spread at the foot, whilst, resting humbly under the shadow of the palace, is the ancient church and the tiny monastery, which for centuries housed the silent Trappists, whose loving care made this holy wood to grow upon the spurs and glens of a granite mountain. Beyond the garden, the wood slopes suddenly down in billows of greenery, and then at its foot spreads the vast plain, with towns and villages nestling in its hollows. And as the sun grows in brightness I see beyond the limits of the plain, far away, a long strip of white, and over it, high up, as it seems above the horizon, a deep violet wall. It is the sea, the broad Atlantic, with its fringe of silvery sand many miles distant, and it gives the supreme touch to a scene of perfect beauty. On the other side of the castle the view is just as lovely in a different way. Beyond the palms and flowers at the foot, seen over a hundred carved crockets and capricious stone pinnacles and gargoyles, with the great tower of the castle and its armillary sphere over all, is a far stretch of undulating wood; and then a vast tumble of mountains, range over range, all but the highest 98clothed to the top with forests, and beyond and above them all the bare granite peaks of the Caramulo range, iridescent now with the morning sun. The domain occupies the whole of the north-western end of a long continuous mountain ridge, some eight miles in total length, running from south-east to north-west and extremely precipitous on all sides. From the earliest times, at all events since the fourth century, the glens and ravines that score these slopes have been jealously guarded by ecclesiastical masters. The sheltered position and soft westerly breezes from the Atlantic endowed the spot with a climate mild, equable, and healthy, even for Portugal, whilst the purity and abundance of the springs and the marvellous fertility of the soil in the deep, moist gorges on the mountain-side made it an enviable place of secluded residence. Whilst the minimum winter temperature is about forty degrees, frost being unknown, the summer heat is tempered by the altitude of the place and by the abundant shade of the woods, so that the temperature rarely exceeds that of a warm July day in England.

With these climatic conditions it is natural that this end of the ridge, protected on all sides, 99should develop a vegetation of extraordinary luxuriance. So remarkably was this the case that the successive ecclesiastical bodies to which it belonged for fifteen hundred years decreed that the woods were for ever to be held sacred as a place of sanctuary and devotion. From the eleventh century onward the domain belonged to the Archbishops of Braga, and in 1626 one of them granted it to the order of shoeless Carmelites, as a retreat remote from the world, where the monks following the strict Trappist rule might meditate in silence undisturbed by the turmoil of their fellow-men. In poverty, and with the hard labour of their own hands, the monks built the little monastery and humble church as they now stand, with other portions since demolished; and, year by year, for two hundred years, planted and tended with devout care the sacred wood which was their one earthly concern. From all quarters of the globe where the Portuguese flag waved, from India, South America, and the Far East, rare plants and trees were sent by Carmelites to their beloved “Matto de Bussaco.” Medicinal herbs, rare and lovely ferns, and exotic fruit and flowers, impossible in other places in Europe, here grew luxuriantly, 100and the silent, white-robed gardeners planted and tended their domain until it became not a wood but a sylvan garden of surpassing beauty, as it remains to-day.

A high wall shuts it in from the rest of the world, whilst a special Bull of Urban VIII., deeply cut to this day upon a great slab on the principal gateway, condemned to major excommunication any person who violated the sanctuary or injured any plant within the sacred precincts; and another papal Bull bans any woman who dares to set her foot upon the domain. Beautiful terraced paths were cut upon the hillsides, and zigzagging down the ravines, fountains that gushed spontaneously from the mossy rocks were dedicated to saints and adorned with sculptured shrines or rustic grottoes. Everything that single-hearted toil and devotional spirit could do, for centuries the shoeless Carmelites did for their remote monastery and the fairy glens of Bussaco; and since the abolition of the monastic orders in Portugal, the Government have tended and guarded the spot as carefully as the silent monks before them. One trembles for each innovation in such a spot as this, and the present road-cutting operations through the wood and 101just around the palace, though the new approaches will doubtless add to the accessibility of the place, cannot fail to injure somewhat its sylvan beauty; just as the building of the palace itself, and especially of the new annexe now in course of construction, further dwarfs and hides the quaint little monastery, which really seems to strike the note harmonious with the place.

To describe in detail the beauties of Bussaco is impossible in the space at my disposal, but one ramble amongst many may be cited as an example of the effect produced by them upon an appreciative visitor. The sky was the deep, lustrous, sapphire blue of which Portugal alone seems to hold the secret, and the fierce sunlight, held in check by the lofty canopy of leaves, just dappled with golden tesselation the steep path up which I wandered from the palace door. On each side of the well-kept walk stood low stone walls, a mass of brilliant emerald, clothed, as they were, with long trailing mosses and tender fronds of ferns innumerable. Autumn as yet had done nothing to braise and brand the greenness of summer; for in this favoured spot the seasons make but slight difference in the vegetation. Verdant glades and dim recesses of sea-green 102shadow open up at every turn in the winding path; domed masses of foliage above and below on the steep sides of the glen seem like the silent naves and aisles of vast cathedrals. To say that the air was like wine is a commonplace. This was primeval air, the breath of a myriad trees and sweet health-giving plants, inhaled upon a mountain top overlooking the boundless sea. Not like wine grossly made by man was this, but like some vital elixir distilled in a magician’s laboratory, bringing new life and vigour, with a sensuous joy added by the spirit of the place and the soft warmth of the shaded sun.

Towering eucalyptus trees, the fawn-coloured bark hanging in long loose strips and showing the silver skin beneath, alternated with pied planes and feathery palms. Pines and cedars of Lebanon, and a score of trees one knows not by name, tower over all, their great trunks (I measured one cedar twenty feet round), clothed at foot by a dense undergrowth of flowering plants. Large camellia trees, agaves and magnolias full of bloom, the big white pendent flower of the datura, the pink and blue masses of hydrangea, and the glistening foliage of orange trees, lit up the shadowy slopes overhung by the dense foliage of the forest; and trails of smilax, and I know not what other verdant creepers hung in festoons from branch to branch.

THE HOTEL, BUSSACO, FROM THE WOODS.

103At the top of the path a moss-grown cross at the foot of a flight of broken stone steps, hard by a crumbling archway, marks the beginning of one of the several pilgrimages of the Cross scattered through the woods, a lichen-covered slab upon the cross recording that: “These two hermitages of the pilgrimage of the Cross were built by order of the Illustrious João de Melo, Bishop and Count, in the year 1694.” The little hermitages stand almost intact, though their thick walls are all overgrown with bright mosses and reaching arms of verdure. Passing beneath the archway, shadowed by a mighty cedar, I find myself at the foot of this Via Sacra, a steep ascent with green and crumbling steps before each open shrine of the Passion every hundred yards or so. The shrines, little quaint square buildings, with the window-like opening breast high, and a kneeling-stone before each, are all dismantled and empty now; though with their cloak of foliage and ferns and their lichen-clothed slabs telling the 104scene of the sacred Passion which used to be exhibited inside, they are perhaps more beautiful so than ever they were. Weeks after, when I saw at Caldas, in course of construction, some very fine sacred groups in enamelled earthenware, the figures half life-size, and was told that these scenes of the Passion were intended by the Government for the restoration of the shrines at Bussaco, I breathed a silent hope that, though the groups might be replaced, no attempt would be made to restore to newness the shrines themselves.

As one trod the old path of the pilgrimage, up mossy steps and past despoiled shrines, with glimpses of sunlit glades and shady green dells, it was impossible to shut away from one’s thoughts those generations of silent white-clad figures, who, shoeless, had toiled so often up the Via Dolorosa, with tears of penitence, perhaps agonies of regret, for the life from which they had fled. All around were relics of their unrecorded labour. Sculptured stones, chapels, hermitages, fountains, grottoes, and shrines were all built by their patient hands; paths scarped on steep hillsides, seats placed in quiet nooks for the meditative and the weary, nay, the trees and plants from all lands growing so proudly now had all been tended anxiously by the same dumb shadows that for centuries waited for death within the walls enclosing the sacred wood. If ever a place was haunted by sad, harmless ghosts, these paths of pilgrimage at Bussaco must still be thronged by the white-robed phantoms of those who made them.

On the Via Sacra, Bussaco.

105Turning aside and descending the glen by a narrower path, a ramble of half a mile brings me to another scene of marvellous beauty. In the foreground is a pool covered with water lilies and overshadowed by trees; and from it, leading straight up the hillside, is the “holy stair,” or cold spring, as it is called. Eleven double flights of stone stairs, each pair of flights leading to a landing of black and white mosaic, whilst in the centre between the two lines of steps a rocky cataract leads a rushing stream of icy cold clear water from the fountain gushing at the top from the rock in its mosaic recess down to the bottom of the hill, where it tumbles tumultuously into the pool. Through the whole length of the long fall, flanked by stairs, perhaps two hundred 106feet, rare ferns and mosses grow with wild luxuriance, especially in and about the pools on the ten landings; and, embosomed as the whole hillside is in dense greenery, it is impossible to exaggerate the delicious coolness and beauty of this secluded spot.

From the top of the Fonte Fria, or Scala Santa, the path leads through a valley, and then precipitously up the ascent that faced me when on the morning after my arrival I stood upon the battlements for the first time. The hermitage of St. Antão stands upon a ledge high up the slope, a tiny dismantled cell, from which a view is gained on a clear day that fairly takes one’s breath away. Below, set in its vast bed of verdure, the white stone castle stands, the gold armillary sphere that crowns its tower glittering in the sun; whilst on the left the far-flung panorama of the plain, with the blue wall of the sea beyond, and the grey mountains on the north, is flooded with an inundation of light, and scattered with the abodes of men—the sombre masses of greenery and the profound silence that surround us making the contrast the more striking. A wider view still than this is obtained from the highest point of the domain, on the very outskirts towards the south, where the Cruz Alta, the “high cross,” marks the site of what in ancient times was a watch-tower of soldier-monks, overlooking the country towards Coimbra, whence the Moors might come to invade the sacred wood.

IN THE GARDENS, BUSSACO.

107A greater battle than ever Christian and Moslem fought raged in later times upon this “Bussaco’s iron ridge,” just outside the granite walls of the wood on the north-west slopes of the long mountain. “Victory’s darling,” Massena, was to bring stubborn Portugal to heel at last. Soult had been expelled in 1809, after Wellington’s surprise of Oporto; and the Emperor was determined that nothing should stand between him and his small victim this time. Massena was at the height of his glory and success, and the flower of the imperial legions, eighty thousand men, marched through Spain, and carried all before him at first in Portugal. Almeida and Vizeu fell into his hands without a struggle; and the invaders thought that no serious obstacle would be offered to the march upon Lisbon by way of Coimbra. The road led them through the valley between 108the long mountains of Bussaco and the Cremullo range opposite, and Wellington, whose headquarters were at Coimbra, fifteen miles distant, decided to stop their progress there. Before the whole of his forces could be got into position, news came that the French had crossed the river Mondego, and the Anglo-Portuguese force gradually fell back, always fighting with the French advance-guard, until the whole of Wellington’s army of nearly 50,000 were stationed upon the long ridge of Bussaco, from the east wall of the domain to the river Mondego, where the mountain ends.

A curious relation exists, hitherto unnoted in English narratives, in which a monk of Bussaco gives a minute account from day to day of the events there from the 20th September 1810 until after the battle on the 27th, and the artless details of the good man are more personally interesting perhaps than the broad facts of the great battle itself. He tells that, on the 20th September, an orderly of Lord Wellington came to the monastery, and: “As soon as the door was opened to him he said, ‘I want to see the monastery, ha! ha! ha! To-morrow at two o’clock the commander-in-chief is coming here. He slept last night at Lorvão, and the French have already arrived at Tondella....’ The prior was told, and he showed the orderly the monastery and chapel, ordering the best lodging-chamber to be cleaned and got ready for the general, and the orderly, after drinking a little wine, galloped back to Lorvão.”

THE PORTA DA SULLA, BUSSACO.

109Early next morning the whole wood, the hermitages, the monastery, and the chapel were filled with English officers, fifty officers being quartered in the monastery itself. Wellington arrived at midday, and when the prior showed him the best guest-chamber, swept and garnished for his use, he refused it, “although it was the best,” because it had only one door, and another apartment with two doors had to be found for him. Whilst this lodging was being prepared and cleaned, the general rode out of the domain by the gate on the north side and inspected the whole position from the highest point of the ridge to the east, on the bare granite crest of which he fixed his own position for the day of the battle. Standing upon this spot there spreads below the steep slopes in the foreground an undulating plain, some five miles across, with Caramulo mountains on the other side. Through 110this broken plain Massena was forced to march in order to turn or cross the Bussaco mountains, and proceed on his road to Coimbra, Lisbon, and Oporto. When he learnt that the English general had decided to risk everything by making a stand there with forces inferior to his own he at first refused to believe it, for constant success had made him think that his troops could do anything; and if Wellington were beaten here, then annihilation would await the English, and Portugal would follow Spain in bowing to the yoke of France. But if Wellington does take the risk, said Massena, “Je le tiens! demain nous finirons la conquête de Portugal, et en un pen de jours je noyerai le léopard.” Ney, Junot, and Regnier in vain counselled Massena not to fling his men away upon attacking such a tremendous position as that of Bussaco, and urged him to retire and await reinforcements from France; but Massena laughed at their wise fears, and decided to storm the height. “There is only the rearguard of the English there,” he said; “if the whole army is there so much the better, the good luck of the darling of victory will not abandon him.”

Every cell and every corner of the monastery and dependencies were full of English troops, 111“except Father Antonio of the Angels’ cell, which no one would have, as it was filled with all sorts of old rags, rubbish, and old iron he could pick up, and the monks had to sleep anywhere.” On the 26th September the French were seen on the mountains opposite and upon the plain below, where skirmishing was constant between advance-guards. The north-east wall of the domain was partly demolished and crowded with English troops, whilst batteries of artillery topped the crest of the ridge, and Crawford’s corps held an outlying spur that projects into the plain from opposite the north gate (Porta da Rainha) of the wood. Lord Wellington rose very early on the morning of the 27th, and to the dismay of the monks ordered his baggage to be sent out of the wood towards Coimbra. It was not for flight, as the monks feared, but prudence, and after breakfast the great general rode out and took his stand upon the top of the ridge of Bussaco, overlooking the long valley. His own troops were to a large extent hidden behind the crest of the hill, and occupied the whole length of the mountain from beyond the Mondego on the north-east to the monastery on the west, Crawford’s position on the projecting spur on 112the English left flank making the position at that end practically semicircular; this left flank consequently enfiladed with its artillery the face of the declivity upon whose crest Wellington’s centre was stationed. On the extreme right of the English, on the other side of the Mondego, General Hill was in command, with the Portuguese under General Fane; but the whole of the rest of the Anglo-Portuguese army was posted upon or behind the long crest of Bussaco, the extreme left under General Crawford being thrust forward upon the projecting spur. At six o’clock on the morning of the 27th September, under cover of a heavy mist, two desperate attacks were delivered upon the centre of the English position. That on the right of the centre was led by Regnier with incredible dash and bravery, but with terrible loss to the French. A whole division of Frenchmen at one point here finally struggled to the summit of the ridge, and the eagles planted on the granite crest proclaimed to Massena that the victory was won. But the 88th and 45th regiments were in reserve behind the crest, and at the captured position gallant Picton was in command. Like an avalanche the two regiments, with a Portuguese battalion, advanced along the ridge with fixed bayonets at the charge. With irresistible impetus they swept all before them. The French division was hurled helter-skelter down the precipitous declivity with hideous ruin and devastation. All the face of Bussaco at that point was sown with the dead and dying, the French loss exceeding four thousand, and the legions of the Darling of Victory experienced the bitterness of their first defeat. This awful carnage took place at some little distance to the right of where Wellington stood on the summit of the ridge though well within sight, and a similar attempt, but with even less success was made still nearer to him on his left; whilst a stubborn and sanguinary struggle took place upon the spur on the extreme English left occupied by Crawford and Packe, upon one point of which now stands the obelisk commemorating the battle.

BUSSACO’S IRON RIDGE.

113The English and Portuguese under English officers vied with each other in stubborn bravery, and the moral result of Bussaco was tremendous, though the material advantage was small. From that hour of defeat the legions of the Emperor knew that they were not invincible, and the sun that was to set at Waterloo first turned its 114meridian when Massena’s gallant infantry were hurled headlong down the hill. By a masterly piece of strategy Wellington, the day after the victory, sent off a division to occupy Coimbra, and when defeated Massena by a circuitous route arrived in the neighbourhood of the city he found himself forestalled, though the English shortly after evacuated it and fell back. The lines of Torres Vedras finally frustrated the French, but Bussaco was the turning-point of victory.

The monkish diarist has many poignant little stories to tell of the horrors into which the monastery was plunged during and after the battle. The wounded were everywhere, but were packed especially close in the little unfinished chapel outside the walls of the wood opposite Crawford’s position, now a commemorative chapel where many relics of the fight are shown.

At midnight on the 28th an English officer hurried to the monastery and reported that Massena was retreating and endeavouring to reach Coimbra by another road. The night was dark and the rain fell heavily, but Wellington rose from his bed, and at once gave orders for the English army to march upon Coimbra. Like 115magic the monastery and wood—even the great mountain itself—was freed from armed men, and before midday nothing was left but the débris of battle and the dead and wounded. The monk who tells his simple tale says that they managed to give beds in the monastery to most of the English officers during their stay, “and a general who was in the bishop’s chapel had a tablecloth, two brass candlesticks, and a great copper jar for water, and also some napkins. All of this,” he adds, “was lost.” “To Lord Wellington,” he continues, “we gave the best napkins we had, four dozens of candles, and everything that the other officers were continually asking for. Even to the common soldiers and the people who came for refuge, we gave salt and all we could. We gave out a lot of wine, bread, cheese, oil, and other things for the troops, and when Lord Wellington was leaving he sent word to the prior that he would pay for what had been supplied, if he would tell him the amount. The prior replied that he asked for nothing but peace. This monastery of ours lost very heavily by the troops. Nearly everything we provided for the beds and tables of the officers disappeared, and not a thing of any value was 116left.... Besides this they stole all the oranges in our two orchards, they forced the door of the storehouse and took all the bread and wine they chose, with a basket of eggs, and a comb of honey, and many other things. Indeed they acted just as badly or worse than the French.”

And so, after the short agony, the wave of war and horror swept away from Bussaco, leaving only the memory behind; and the sacred wood was abandoned to the white-robed monks:—

THE BATTLE MONUMENT, BUSSACO.

It is all forgotten now, and nothing matters much, I mused, as I wandered up the dark avenue of cypress, yew, and pine that leads to the low three-arched façade of the old monastery. Before the quaint little one-storey porch, faced with designs of coats-of-arms, flowers, and scrolls in black and white mosaic, stands an ancient cross, and within the entrance is the tiny cloister and 117church that alone remains of the monastery. I wandered into the dim cloister full of thoughts of Bussaco’s baptism of blood, though it was all quiet and peaceful now in this humble retreat. At each corner of the cloister stands a dismantled altar, faced with coloured tiles of Talavera majolica, and the walls between the windows are hung with mouldering and tattered canvases of dead and gone Carmelites—saintly men whose bones lie beneath our feet and in the little green enclosure formed by the cloister. Around the walls on three sides are the doors of the cells, each door covered, as are the timbers of the cloister, with rough cork bark, which adds to the appearance of antiquity. One picture attracted my attention, a poor defaced painting, faded by time and weather, representing at full length a white-clad monk holding a skull in his left hand, and in his right a scroll. Something noble and dignified in the appearance of the face attracted me, and I tried to decipher the almost effaced inscription on the scroll. It was difficult, but at last I read that the monk was the “Reverend Father, Fray Luis de Jesus,” who in the world had been called the Marquis of Mancera, when the seventeenth century was 118young. And beneath the name this distich ran:—

As I pondered on this curious couplet, “Death makes me leave What might me grieve,” in the shadowy cloister, there came towards me a phantom of the past. It was an old, old man dressed in brown undyed homespun, short jacket, and breeches of a bygone fashion, and the universal black knitted stocking nightcap of the Portuguese peasant. He hobbled out of the cell where the great duke had slept the nights before the battle; and as he came slowly towards me, supported by a long staff, he courteously doffed his cap, and wished me good day. He was, he told me, ninety-three years old, but his eyes were still bright and his skin clear, and I fell into discourse with the ancient, as we rested together upon a bench in the darkling cloister, through the end door of which a bright splash of orange sunlight sent shimmering waves into the dimness.

Yes! graças à Deus, he was well, notwithstanding his great age, and he dwelt, past work now, with his son, a sort of foreman on the domain, in the double cell which had been that of the prior 119of the monastery. He was born in a neighbouring village, and had never been far away. He had witnessed the expulsion of the monks and the building of the beautiful palace that had pushed aside the pathetic abode of penitence, humility, and patience. In his prime he had known and talked to many of those who had witnessed the great battle on Bussaco’s slopes, and he told me artlessly, and in his quavering treble, how all down the slope, upon which I saw him the next day, the dead and wounded Frenchmen had lain thickly, with their arms, drums, and big shakoes scattered around them; how the poor wretches, crying in their agony for a draught of water, were refused by the country people, who hated so bitterly the invaders of their fatherland; how the good monks strove their hardest, succouring the wounded, French, English, and Portuguese alike, and reverently burying the dead in consecrated ground.

As the old man spoke, quietly and gently, telling at first-hand the story of nearly a century ago, my mind went back to another old man whom I had known when I was little more than a child, who himself had fought in this battle; but to my eager inquiries for details had little 120of satisfaction to impart. But, somehow, the mere fact of having known an actor in the scene, however inarticulate, and now to be speaking upon the spot with one who had all his life heard direct from those who witnessed it the story that made his countryside for ever famous, brought nearer to me the vivid vision of long ago. Bussaco fight to me for a brief space was real, as Salamanca and Vitoria never can be, and I feel that for one half hour I have lived in the time when the giants of the world contended for mastery.

Outside the cloister the dream vanished. The lofty white tower with its golden globe, emblem of Portugal’s princely pioneer of extended empire, spoke of another age and aroused other memories: peace, luxury, and security reigned now supreme in this ancient abode of austerity, and no invader of the land was possible. The far-spread forest wafted its balsamic breath to me, and the myriad leaves softly whispered in the sensuous breeze, as if that awful day of the 27th September 1810 had never dawned upon the sacred wood. Bussaco is beautiful enough to live in the present without its one cruel memory, gently pensive occasionally at the thought of the stern, sad, anchorites who laboured to make it perfect for 121the glory of God. But to Englishmen—aye, and to Frenchmen and Portuguese too—there must come at least once during their stay a rousing bugle blast that calls their souls to arms and bids them honour their glorious dead who stood and fell so gallantly upon Bussaco’s granite ridge in the long long ago.

ENTRANCE TO THE CLOISTER, BUSSACO.

V COIMBRA, THOMAR, AND LEIRIA

The morning was sparkling, the sky without a fleck, and the air like draughts of nectar, as I slowly descended from the monastery and hotel of Bussaco, through the lovely umbrageous “valley of ferns” to the “Gate of Grottoes,” in the south wall of the wood, where I had directed a carriage to await me and carry me to Coimbra, fifteen miles distant. I was loath to leave this exquisite spot, which art and nature have conspired to make perfect; the fairy glens, the unrivalled prospects from the heights, the spacious magnificence and homely comfort of the guest-house—but I had already exceeded my allotted time, and other places called me.

ON THE SUMMIT OF BUSSACO, THE CRUZ ALTA.

Our road lay downward for a mile or two, through a beautiful country of pines and gorgeous stretches of purple heather in full bloom; and here and there long trellised vineyards, 123with the red bronze of the vine-leaves adding a splash of colour to the scene. As we wound down and along the plain, there always towered above us, as it seemed right overhead, the “Cruz Alta” of Bussaco amidst the trees at the highest point of the wood, near where the wall limited the greenery; and soon the whole of the long, sharp hog’s-back of granite ridge, standing clear and distinct from surrounding mountains, tremendous in bulk, is seen from the plain. It was hard to realise that only yesterday I had stood, without fatigue or trouble, upon that giddy height of the Cruz Alta, which looked from here as if an eagle alone might reach it.

Patient ox-teams toil along, led by small boys in black nightcaps, gravely courteous to the stranger, and black-eyed solemn children play soberly by the wayside and take no heed. Soon we pass through the big, poor-looking village of Pampilhosa, and leave the pines and heather behind us; for here down in the valley olives, cork trees, ilex, and vines abound, with figs, pears, and apples, in orchards nestled round the white cottages. Aloe hedges, with the big, fleshy lancet leaves of silver-grey, show that 124we are in a sub-tropical land, and patches of succulent sugar-cane for cattle fodder grow brilliantly green against the maize and millet fields; whilst all along the wayside the light-leafed poplars rear their straight shafts, heavily burdened by masses of purple grapes and flaming vine leaves, the only sign of autumn, though October is now upon us.

As we near Coimbra, though it is not much past noon, we meet many groups of handsome country women, with, as usual, heavy burdens upon their heads, returning home from the weekly market in the city. Barefooted they go invariably, with their fine broad shoulders, full bosoms, classical faces, and broad, low brows, their gay kerchiefs on head and bosom, and their fine eyes gazing straight forth with modest dignity; and mentally I deny assent to the boast of Guimarães that its maids and matrons reign supreme in buxom grace, for those of Coimbra need bow the head to none on earth. All around the city are gently rounded undulating hills covered by olive orchards, and as the road tops one of them we see the picturesque old capital beneath us upon its steep slope, the broad Mondego at its foot, and 125beyond the river a high green ridge crowned by an immense white convent.

In the ancient times, as the Christian monarchs wrested from the Moors one territory after another, and drove the Crescent ever farther south, the capital of Portugal followed the victorious standard, and Guimarães soon had to cede its place to Coimbra, which remained the capital from the time of the first Affonso (Henriques) in the twelfth century until the extinction of his dynasty in the fourteenth, and occasionally later. Coimbra is crowded with memories of the heroic times, of combats with the Moors, and of deeds of violence and blood perpetrated within its walls; and in its quaint crowded streets are corners that can hardly have changed since the Affonsos and Sanchos here held their court—the Arco d’Almedina leading out of the principal street, Rua do Visconde da Luz, for instance, and the quaint renascence palace, incorrectly called the palace of the martyred Maria de Telles, in the Rua de Sub-Ripas.

But to the famed Church of Santa Cruz, all that remains intact of a vast Augustian monastery, the pilgrim’s steps first turn. It stands 126in an open place at the end of the Rua do Visconde da Luz, sunk several feet below the present level of the street, and the magnificent Manueline, or Portuguese renascence front is spoilt by a mean and hideous detached portico, in front of the real doorway, with its fine carved figures and capricious canopies. The lower part of the octagonal tower is much damaged, and the delicately carved decorations destroyed; but enough remains of the upper part to prove the magnificence with which King Manuel in the beginning of the sixteenth century rebuilt the sepulchre of the earliest kings. In this church, of which the interior, lined with pictorial blue tiles, is now reduced to eighteenth-century aridity, with the exception of the roof and chancel where the magnificent tombs with recumbent figures of Affonso Henriques and his son, King Sancho, shame the tastelessness of the later work, a dramatic scene was once enacted. Both these first kings of Portugal had worn the habit of St. Augustine, and were lay members of this monastery where their bones were laid. In order to establish his right to the patronage of the foundation, King Manuel, in 1510, rebuilt the church and monastery 127in the exuberant and gorgeous style associated with his reign; and when the time came to restore the bodies of the kings to the new sepulchres prepared for them, Manuel caused the mummified corpse of Affonso Henriques to be clad in royal robes and kingly crown, enthroned before the high altar of Santa Cruz, and there receive the homage of his subjects as if still alive. The pulpit of the church, the work of Jean de Rouen, though stripped now of its side pilasters and famous canopy, is one of the most splendid examples of early French renascence; but the richest treasure of the church is a splendid early triptych, in the mysterious style of the so-called Gran Vasco (who is a mythical painter), in which the early Flemings are imitated exactly by apparently Portuguese hands. This triptych, which should be compared with the “Fountain of Life” described in the chapter on Oporto, and also with the famous “St. Peter” at Vizeu, is signed “Vellascus,” and represents in its three panels the “Ecce Homo,” the “Calvary” and the “Pentecost,” with the exquisite finish and glowing colour of Van Eyck and Memling. The cloisters of the church are a beautiful specimen, as is much of the exterior 128of the church itself, of the peculiar Manueline renascence Gothic, of which I have so frequently spoken, the motives being the capricious intertwining of cordage and branches, spiral bossed mouldings, exuberant pinnacles, and pendent floreated ornaments on the interior lines of arches and vaultings. Of this style the Bussaco palace-hotel is a notable modern specimen, and in a later chapter I propose to treat in some detail the other examples inspected during my trip. By the side of Santa Cruz, separated from it by a road formerly spanned by a high bridge, lies a splendid massive tower, and a huge block of the old monastic buildings now turned into a squalid barrack, so often the fate of the profanated religious houses in Portugal, whilst behind the church and cloister lies another large portion also turned to secular uses.

A STREET IN COIMBRA.

Coimbra is famous as the seat of learning for all Portugal—for many centuries, and still, the only university town in the realm. The huge square bulk of the university buildings on the crest of the hill overlooking the town typify the absolute domination of the place by the academical tradition. The hotel on the Alameda, 129like other hostelries of its sort, has no lack of commercial customers, but even they, assertive as they are, are swamped by the university professors, staff and graduates, who flock to its tables for their meals; whilst in the streets bookshops jostle each other all filled with text-books, and the unmistakable students are everywhere. And yet, with all this academical presence, there is none of that staid atmosphere of aloof erudition which is especially noticeable at Cambridge, and, to a lesser degree, at Oxford. It is true that the youngsters at Coimbra affect a garb at which the present-day undergraduate at Cambridge would scoff, if he did not proceed to more violent means to reduce its primness. A very clerical-looking black frock-coat, buttoned to the chin, is de rigueur, covered by a long black cloak reaching to the wearer’s heels, although, to tell the truth, this cloak, like a Cambridge third-year man’s gown, is oftener festooned over one shoulder or trailed along upon the arm than worn decorously as intended.

These Coimbra youths wear no head covering, and affect a gravity of demeanour whilst in the streets that gives them all the appearance of budding priests. But the absence of a collegiate 130system brings both staff and students into more direct contact with the town than is the case with our older universities, and the peculiar learned atmosphere of the High at Oxford or King’s Parade at Cambridge does not exist. It is a stiff climb up the hill to the university, and the cathedrals. The former is built round three sides of a large court, with a tower in one corner and an observatory in the open face, the enormous palace of the rector occupying one entire side of the square. Seven good light classrooms and a fine hall, senate-house, and examination rooms, give ample accommodation; and the view of the city from the end of the corridor containing the lecture-rooms is exceedingly fine. The library is a gorgeous gilt and over-decorated room in the florid taste of the eighteenth century, the worst possible style for a place of quiet study; and almost the only attractive feature in the exterior of the university is the fine Manueline doorway to the chapel in the great quadrangle. Here twisted cables, rich mouldings, floreated crockets and pinnacles, armillary spheres and crosses, the usual notes of the style, mark the work as being of the period when Portugal was ebullient with feverish energy and ambition.

131Hard by is the bishop’s palace, now almost a ruin, but with some lovely bits of Manueline, and a delightful sixteenth-century courtyard like a scene upon the stage. The old cathedral (Sé Velha) upon the same hill, is perhaps the most perfect and unspoilt specimen of pure Romanesque of the twelfth century in the Peninsula. The deeply recessed west door, with round arch, quadruple ball mouldings, finely decorated Byzantine Romanesque pillars, and a large, recessed window in the same style above, occupy a square projecting battlemented tower flanked on each side by other square towers at the corners. On the south side the early renascence door reaching to the battlemented roof of the aisle is practically in ruins; but the pure, solid Romanesque of the rest of the building stands sturdy as ever after eight centuries. Small and grave, the nave and aisles, with the beautiful round-headed, recessed clerestory windows and capricious Romanesque Byzantine capitals, remain unmarred, though gilt and alabaster altars and chapels clamour for notice, and splendid sarcophagi of bishops and nobles on all sides contrast with the stern lines of the original building. Two features of the more recent periods deserve 132attention, the truly superb high-altar of Flemish workmanship of the first years of the sixteenth century, and the circular chapel of the Soares family, dated 1566. I could not tear myself away from the contemplation of the exterior of this old Sé on the hill over Coimbra, and at night when the darkness of the ancient city was hardly disturbed by flickering lamps, I lingered in the square around the battlemented walls and sturdy towers, reconstructing the scenes that had been enacted here, and calling up in imagination from their eternal sleep those great ones who rested so quietly within.

The new cathedral (Sé Nova) is a plain and ugly pseudo-classical building, in the so-called Jesuit style, standing on the summit of the hill, and only merits notice on account of its treasures. These form a veritable museum of early ecclesiastical art, from the twelfth century onward. I have rarely seen a finer specimen of goldsmith’s work than the custode of George d’Almeida, of pure Portuguese Gothic, in a similar style, but more imposing than the chalice already described at the Misericordia at Oporto.

Looking across the beautiful river Mondego from the acacia-shaded alameda where stands 133the hotel, the high wooded ridge straight opposite is crowned by the vast white convent of Santa Clara, once the glory of Coimbra and the cloister of queens, now partly destroyed and partly desecrated and turned into a factory. The heat was oppressive on the morning after my arrival at Coimbra, but a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Isabel the Queen, and to the shrine of love near to it, could not be foregone. Crossing the bridge I first wended my way to a beautiful villa almost on the banks of the river, in whose grounds there stands the Gothic ruin of a palace, and adjoining it gushing from a rock shaded by dark cedars a copious spring leaps joyously along a stone channel of some twenty feet long into a stone tank covered with water lilies. It is a lovely tranquil spot, where no sound reaches but the rustling of leaves and the gurgling of crystal water, and yet here, tradition says, was enacted in the long ago one of those tragedies that inspire poets, painters, and dramatists for all time. It was in 1355, and Ines de Castro, the lovely mistress of the Prince Dom Pedro, had so infatuated him that he refused to marry another at his father’s bidding. The King, Alfonso IV., incensed at the recalcitrancy 134of his heir, caused Ines to be done to death here beside the “Fountain of Love” by three courtiers. The son, Dom Pedro, rose in rebellion, and saw his father no more; but when two years afterwards the king died and Pedro succeeded him, he worked his ghastly revenge upon those who had persecuted his beloved. Ines had been buried at Santa Clara, the convent near, to which this estate belonged, and now her body was disinterred, dressed in royal robes, crowned with a diadem and adorned with jewels, and placed, a crumbling corpse, thus arrayed upon a throne in the monastery-Church of Alcobaça, whilst all the courtiers upon their knees kissed the dead hand of her whom they had insulted and contemned in life. Upon a stone by the side of the fountain this verse of Camões is inscribed:—

“The fountain of love in the garden of tears” is the spot called to this day, and a crumbling 135little Gothic convent founded by the lover king between this and the river bears the name of “the convent of tears.”

Above us gleams the long white building of Santa Clara, and zigzagging up the steep hill lies the path, shrines at each turn of the way inviting to devotion and to rest. The sun beats fiercely on the steep white road, but the view from the summit upon the esplanade that faces the convent church repays the trouble of the climb. Opposite, across the river, the city is piled up upon its grand amphitheatre of hills, the huge, square bulk of the university and the Sé Nova topping it all; whilst beyond the rolling hills covered with olives provide a dark-green background, which throws into higher relief the blue, white, and pink houses grouped in the limpid air, under a cloudless sky, flooded with sunlight.

Of all the rich foundation of the royal convent of Santa Clara all that now remains devoted to religious uses is the white church, and the adjoining sanctuary of the saintly queen, tended by ladies dedicated to charitable work, but not cloistered. The church is mainly of the seventeenth century, in the usual “Jesuit” style, and is crowded with gilt and carved woodwork; a large stately, 136unencumbered interior, containing several sarcophagi of members of the royal house, and the rich treasure in the sacristy must on no account be missed. A turret stair at the west end leads into a small loft overlooking the church, and richly, but sombrely decorated. Here stands a little altar, and on lifting a trap in the centre of it, and peering down through a grating a most impressive scene is presented to the view. A large, solemn choir-chamber, with carved stalls in rows, extending lengthwise along it, and the ample central space occupied by a magnificent canopy, under which, lit by a tiny red lamp burning eternally before it, lies a great coffin of rich repoussé silver, in which there rests the body of the sainted queen, the patron of Coimbra, the heroic Aragonese princess, who in 1323, rode between the armies of her husband, King Diniz, and their rebellious son, and stayed their unnatural strife at her own great peril.

SANTA CLARA, COIMBRA.

One other royal shade at least haunts the royal convent of Santa Clara. Here, retired from the turmoil of ambitions and wrongs, of which through her youth she had been the victim, passed the long years of her devout renunciation that injured Princess Joan, “the Beltraneja,” daughter of 137Henry IV. of Castile, whom the great Isabel the Catholic ousted from her inheritance. Here in Coimbra, too, the tragedy of Maria de Telles, subject of poems and plays innumerable, was enacted in real life. King Ferdinand the Handsome, about 1371, though betrothed to a Castilian princess, fell in love with a lady called Leonor de Telles, and so endangered the recently concluded alliance. His people rose in revolt, and the lady’s family, especially her sister Maria, resented the adulterous connection. Leonor, secure in her mastery over the king, wreaked a terrible revenge upon those who opposed her; poison, the dagger, and the dungeon doing her fell work, until all Portugal was in fear at her feet, and the king became her wedded husband. The virtuous sister, Maria de Telles, happily married to the king’s half-brother, João, and safe in her palace at Coimbra, was difficult to attack. But the wicked Leonor was equal to the occasion, and, like a female Iago, instilled into the ears of the prince suspicions of his wife’s fidelity, and with forged evidence prompted him to revenge. The enraged husband murdered his protesting and innocent wife in cold blood at Coimbra (but not at the house now shown as 138the scene of the tragedy), and as soon as the foul deed was done Queen Leonor, who had been waiting in an adjoining room, entered, and, in the presence of the murdered Maria, mocked at the husband’s pain, and showed him that her sister was innocent. The prince in his rage attempted to murder the treacherous queen, but was seized, and subsequently escaped into exile, whilst Leonor lived to perpetrate other misdeeds.

I paced the acacia-shaded alameda as the sun sank below the hills, thinking of these sad memories of the times long past; of the noble self-sacrifice of the sainted queen, of the long agony of the Beltraneja, and of the blood-stained soul of Leonor. The air was cool and fresh, and the glowing sunset faded from crimson to dead rose in the west; but across the shimmering river the after-glow, like a luminous opal dawn, threw up the black silhouette of the wooded ridge, and the vast bulk of Santa Clara on the crest stood sharp and clear as if cut out of black velvet and laid upon pearly satin. And just over the great convent church a star of dazzling brilliancy—the brightest star, it seemed to me, I have ever beheld—blazed out alone in the pellucid sky, and tipped with diamond the cross above the 139silent silver shrine with its dim red lamp burning through the centuries. Thus sweet self-sacrifice conquers over time and death. The mouldering bones are naught, darkness enshrouds even the huge building in which they lie; yet far aloft the cross still stands distinct above all, gemmed with its glittering star, as the eternal memory of good deeds done still illumines the blackness of the world.

The next morning I took the train for Chão de Maçãs, a little roadside station, where a carriage had been ordered to meet me, and carry me two leagues over the mountains to Thomar. There was some stay at Pombal, where it was a feast day, and the peasant costumes were seen at their best—good upstanding people these, gaily clad, sober, and orderly, coming to the railway stations in good time and unhurried, but not hours before the train starts, as the peasants do in Spain. In the market, under the shadow of the great mediæval castle ruins on the hill, they do their buying and selling, live-stock for the most part to-day, without vociferation, but with an earnest quietness which is as far as possible from depression. Here at Pombal, and at Albergaria near, the men wear brown undyed homespun jackets, 140and trousers girt with red sashes. The bag cap is almost universal, and mutton-chop whiskers are the rule, but what will attract a foreign visitor most in their dress are the curious triple-caped ulsters, made of layers of grass, seen in many places in Portugal in wet weather, but especially in this neighbourhood. These garments, bulky as they look, are not heavy, and are an excellent protection against heavy rain.

The women here have very full, short, gathered skirts, and though none of them wear shoes or stockings hardly any are without heavy ancient jewelry of gold filigree apparently of considerable value. The bodices of the dresses are mostly red or yellow, and a broad horizontal stripe of bright colour often enlivens the skirt also, their brilliant head-kerchiefs being usually topped by a broad-brimmed velveteen hat, for the pork-pie hat of the north has been left behind now.

We had mounted into the country of pines and heather when we stopped at the little station of Chão de Maçãs, dumped down, as it seemed, in the wilderness with just a row of one-storey whitewashed cottages opposite. But where was the carriage? None had been heard of there, and I found myself several miles from anywhere, 141and with no means of conveyance. Sympathetic interest was not wanting. A muleteer loudly deplored that he was engaged to carry a load of goods to Ourem, and could not take me to Thomar. Clearly something must be done, however; so the little meeting of grave consultants adjourned from the station platform to the door of the humble general shop and tavern opposite to continue the important discussion. It happened that the whole village was just then deeply absorbed in witnessing an itinerant barber cutting a man’s hair in an open stable whilst the onlookers criticised and suggested improvements and variations in the process; but when the news spread that a strange gentleman was stranded at Chão de Maçãs with no conveyance to take him to Thomar, the critics of the barber’s art adjourned en masse to the tavern, and respectfully joined in the discussion as to my fate. They were quite unanimous in agreeing that the Senhor Mathias Araujo, the hotelkeeper at Thomar, could not have received the letter or he would certainly have sent the carriage, of that there could be no doubt whatever. But oh! that correio, the post, was always at fault; and then many anecdotes were given at great length of hairbreadth 142escapes and heavy losses incurred by the sins and omissions of the Portuguese post-office. All this was no doubt interesting, but not helpful to me in my quandary, and I gently led the talk again to the chance of my getting a conveyance. The outlook was not hopeful, but the sympathetic muleteer somewhat doubtfully suggested to the innkeeper that some one near had a pair of mules. A significant look passed round, but the hint was not lost upon me, and by dint of much diplomacy a rapaz was sent off for the mules. He returned by-and-by with an excellent-looking pair of animals, and an ancient shandrydan was pulled out of a stable. I wondered what had caused the hesitation, but my wonder did not last long. No sooner were the mules hitched to the bar than they began to kick furiously. Kicking chains were of little use; the lout who drove the team used his whip with heart and arm, the pieced and spliced rope and chain harness was strained almost to breaking, and the ancient “machine” threatened every moment to disintegrate into splinters.

A COUNTRY RAILWAY STATION.

And so the team kicked their hardest all the seven miles to Thomar, and performed the distance, as it seemed to me, in one continued 143gymnastic exercise, more on their fore-legs than on their full complement of limbs. But kicking mules were powerless to mar the delight of the drive. The road was a perfect one, over hills covered with pines and dales ablaze with purple heather. The cool mountain breeze, laden with the scent of wild thyme, brought with it a new sense of delight which made breathing a conscious enjoyment, and the jaded elderly person in the shivering shandrydan felt impelled to shout aloud in mere exhilaration of living in such an atmosphere. Only a three weeks before I had seen Deeside at its best, but Deeside heather was dull, and the Deeside pine-clad hills in their wreaths of clouds were depressing, in comparison with this sparkling sweep of sandy moor and mountain.

Turning the shoulder of the highest ridge we came in sight of the vast and beautiful valley below us with Thomar in its midst upon its river bank nestling in greenery, with its steep, abrupt hill and castle standing sentinel over it. It was Sunday, and, although broad daylight when I drove into Thomar, a flight of rockets rushed into the air from the town-hall, and the braying of a brass band told me that the town was en fête. It was, I learnt, 144the ceremony of prize-giving and treating the school children by the town council, and all the little ones, clean, chubby, and well-clad they looked, were trooping, shouting, and cheering, as children do the world over. I found a warm welcome at the Hotel União, and was soon convinced that the Chão de Maçãs meeting was right in their assurance that the failure to send the carriage was from no fault of the host, a gentleman of cultured manners and tastes, quite unlike the ordinary type of Portuguese innkeeper. He was distressed to have received no letter to advise him of my coming, as he ought to have done two days before, but an hour or two afterwards he rushed into my room, excited and triumphant. He had forced them to open the post-office, Sunday though it was, and had rescued my letter from a heap which some careless postman had neglected to deliver! Thenceforward Senhor Jose Mathias Araujo, a pattern of Portuguese hotelkeepers, was indefatigable in making me, a mere passing stranger though I was, of whose name he had only heard vaguely, feel at home and comfortable at Thomar.

A CORNER OF THE TOWN HALL AND THE CONVENT, THOMAR.

The place is one which to my latest days I shall never forget. A clean little rectangular 145town with straight streets of singularly modern aspect, on the banks of an exquisitely beautiful stream fringed by trees and gardens. The shops for the most part are but doorways open upon the street, for they have not adopted the modern fashion of windows for the display of goods. And life in general seems to pass drowsily, for with the exception of a small factory in some ancient conventual buildings on the farther bank of the stream, there is not much doing in the place.

But the object of my coming to this sweet, dull, little town pervades it everywhere. At the end of the three straight streets running from the river to the square market-place, with its ancient church and town-hall, there looms upon a steep hill, right up over the roofs as it seems, the most splendid and interesting mediæval castle-monastery in this land of hill-top strongholds—the ancient fortress headquarters of the crusading knights of the Order of Christ, successors in Portugal of the Templars. Thomar was the metropolis and fief of the Order, and on all sides the emblem of their peculiar cross is evident. Impressed upon my mind for ever is the view as I first gazed upon it from the 146main street (of course, incongruously called now after Serpa Pinto) on the sparkling autumn day. Clear and sharp high up on the hill against the indigo sky stood a ruined bell tower through whose gaping window the light shone, with tall, pointed cypresses by its side, and flanked by a mighty stretch of warm, grey battlements, above which rose the bulk of a great square keep.

A zigzag path leads from behind the sixteenth-century town-hall in the praça up the rocky sides of the precipitous hill. Gnarled olive trees, dwarf oaks, and aloes grew in the crevices and amidst the ruins of outer walls upon the face of the declivity; and the outer donjon, still standing unwrecked across the path, shows the tremendous strength even of these exterior defences. Above these loomed the Titanic walls, their battlemented sides and turrets, all stained a golden yellow with the lichen that covered them. The inner donjon, which adjoins the picturesque ruined bell tower, gives entrance to a charming grassy garden with tall cypresses, orange trees, and gay flowers, growing in what was once the wide courtyard of the castle; and the huge square main keep standing in the midst, all dismantled as it is, rears its flame-tinged battlements as proudly as when the soldiers of the Cross held this isolated stronghold against the hordes of Islam. The walls are everywhere pierced with loopholes in the shape of a cross surmounting a globe, and the cruciform device of the Order is graven upon stones on all sides.

SOME BEAUTIES OF THOMAR.

147Connected with the walls of the ancient castle, and upon a somewhat higher level than the keep, there stands the high round church of the Templars, with buttresses of immense strength reaching to the parapet, and a crumbling square bell tower upon one of its faces. Upon an ancient slab let into the sides of the church an inscription tells how Dom Affonso, first King of Portugal, and Gualdrim Paes, master of the Portuguese Templars, constructed this edifice in 1108. Joined to this ancient structure is one of the most astounding specimens of Manueline architecture in Portugal, built in the early sixteenth century, when all the country was pulsating with new life and eager longings. It is the choir and chapter-house, and behind them is the ruin of the great monastery of the Order of Christ. Words are weak to convey an idea of 148the capricious splendour of the choir and chapter-house so far as they remain undefaced, for later ages have done their best to spoil the edifice. Eight cloisters have been built around it, and tacked on to it, by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its lovely Manueline doorway has been marred, and the east end of the building blocked as high as its upper windows by the “Cloister of the Philips.”

The Choir and Chapter-House, Thomar.

But notwithstanding all the vandalism, enough of the Manueline building remains intact to strike the beholder with reverent wonder at the intricate beauty of the work, and the inexhaustible invention of the design. The doorway stands in a recess reaching to the parapet, and enclosed within an arch of surprising beauty, of which the under curve is lined with an elaborate pendent ornament. Within the recess filling the whole space and over the door itself, figures in niches stand under canopies and upon pillars in which caprice and intricacy surpass themselves. Coiled cables, bossed spirals, floreated pinnacles, armillary spheres, crosses, and intertwined branches, stand out in high relief and under cut, as if the sculptors had purposely sought difficulties in order to overcome them. 149The arch of the door itself is beyond description, so luxuriant is the design of the chiselled stone which forms the three grooves and two spiral pilasters around it. The parapet of the whole edifice is similarly rich, alternating the cross of the Order with the armillary sphere; and although most of the lower part of the walls is hidden, the view of the east end with its two corner towers, as seen from the roof of the adjoining cloister, is magnificent. The lower window, which lights the interior of the choir, is a massive tangle of outstanding cables; each point being crowned by the cross and the armillary sphere which formed the device of the grand master, the famous Prince Henry the Navigator. Around one of the corner towers a great chain cable, each link carved entire in stone, is braced, and around the other an equally tremendous buckled belt, representing the Order of the Garter, which the Prince, a Plantagenet on his mother’s side, possessed. The upper window which lights the chapter-house is more suggestive still. It is a highly decorated circular light bevilled into the deep thickness of the wall, and represents upon the sloping inner face of the 150circle a series of bulging staysails, each held down by a rope.

But all this description in detail is incapable of conveying an idea of the richness of effect produced by the whole work. The exuberance of the style and its tricky capriciousness may be, and are, condemned by purists as in questionable taste; but as an outcome of national feeling, and as an example of original inventive ingenuity and patience, this and other notable specimens of the style, to which reference will be made later, are of the highest interest to the student, and a delight to the ordinary observer who can free himself from the straightlaced traditions of the schools.

Inside the grave old round church of the Templars, to which this gorgeous edifice was to serve as a choir for the warrior monks of Christ, a fine Byzantine altar stands in the centre. The interior of the edifice itself is a quaint and curious mixture of Byzantine, Moorish, Romanesque, and Gothic, the pillars being painted and gilt in oriental taste, whilst the splendid canopy over the central altar is pure Gothic, and dated 1500. In four of the eleven arched spaces upon the wall of the circular church there are some 151ancient pictures of the highest interest, the remaining seven having been stolen by the French invaders in the Napoleonic wars. The paintings are fine enough to be by the hand of Jan Van Eyck himself, and are, as usual, ascribed by Portuguese to the mythical Gran Vasco. It is far more likely, however, that they may be the work of a painter called Jean Dralia of Bruges, who was living in this monastery at the end of the fifteenth century, and is buried here. It is lamentable to see the condition to which these masterpieces have been allowed to fall from sheer want of care; and unless they are promptly rescued, a few years more will complete their ruin.

The great choir, added on to the round church, presents in its interior the same wealth of fancy as that already described on the outside; but the wonderful choir stalls of the Manueline period were stolen or destroyed during the French invasion. As I stood under the exquisitely carved ceiling of this choir, looking towards the Byzantine altar in the round church before me, my mind flew back to a scene enacted here in April 1581, which I had more than once endeavoured to describe in writing 152without having seen the place. Philip II. had followed in the devastating steps of Alba to wrest from the native Portuguese pretender the crown he coveted. Portugal had sullenly bent its neck to the yoke, and the nobles had either been exiled or bought to the side of the Spaniard. But one thing more was needed to make grim Philip legally King of Portugal as well as King of Spain. The Portuguese Cortes, elected of the people, though in this case elected with Alba’s grip upon its throat, had to swear allegiance to the new monarch, and Philip had to pledge his oath to respect the rights and liberties of his new subjects. The stronghold of the Knights of Christ at Thomar was chosen by the Spaniard for the crowning act of Portuguese national subjection; and here Philip arrived on the 15th March 1581. On the 3rd April, in one of those charming little letters to his orphan daughters, he wrote from Thomar saying that the Cortes would sit soon, for many people were already arriving, and the oaths would be taken as soon as they were met. “You have heard,” he says, “that they insist upon my dressing in brocade, much against my will, but they say it is the custom here.”

153On the 16th of April the church of the monastery was aglow with shimmer of gold and gems and rich stuffs. Under a dais at the end of this choir Philip sat in a robe of cloth of gold over a dress of crimson brocade; though his heart was sad for the death of his last wife, and he hated splendour in his broken old age. After mass had been said, the Cortes did homage and swore to keep their faith to him as king; and then stepping down from the throne, he advanced to the high altar and solemnly pledged his word to respect the laws and liberties of Portugal. How little he relished the splendour is seen in a letter he sent to his girls from Thomar a fortnight later, as soon as he could find time to write to those whom he loved more dearly than any other creatures on earth. “How much I wish,” he wrote, “you could have seen the ceremony of taking the oath from a window as my nephew [the Archduke Albert] did, who saw everything excellently. But I send you a full account of it all.... I have given the Golden Fleece to the Duke of Braganza, and he went with me to mass, both of us wearing the collar of the Order; which upon my mourning looked very bad, and I can 154tell you he looked much smarter than I did, although they say that the day of the oath was the first time he had worn low shoes, though everybody is wearing them here now except myself.” Thomar, for the last time in its existence, was a blaze of splendour for those six feverish weeks; for Spanish and Portuguese nobles, jealous of each other, vied in lavish expenditure; and then the fortress of the Knights was left to its solitude: gradually royal encroachments stripped the Order of its wealth and power, and Thomar lived in memory alone.

The upper chamber of the Manueline building over the choir is the chapter-house of the Order of Christ. A grand, low, pillared hall, with the twisted cables and the repeated cross and sphere, testifying once more to the reigning idea of the period of the Navigator Grand-Master. Here it was that the Portuguese Cortes sat to confirm the religious act of allegiance to Philip, and set the seal of subservience upon the nation for nearly a century. Every carved stone and crocket has a story to tell if we could but hear it. Here in the older monastic building the Navigator himself held his chapters, dwelling in the adjoining palace, in the intervals of his 155life-task upon his eyrie at Sagres; here in the “cloisters of the Philips,” dull Philip III. held his monastic court upon his one visit to Portugal; and the magnificent cloister of John III. testifies to the classical reaction after the exuberance of the times of his father Dom Manuel.

In the quaint little Gothic cloister around the burial-place of the monks, called the “Cloister of Dom Henrique,” a strange sight is to be seen in the upper ambulatory. Baltasar de Faria was the instrument of Philip II. in forcing the Spanish form of Inquisition ruthlessly upon Portugal, and in cruelty surpassed his master. So bitterly hated was he that the saying ran that earth itself would reject and refuse to assimilate the body of such a monster. In the lid of a stone coffin in the cloister a pane of glass is set, and he who will may gaze and see how Baltasar de Faria looks now. He was a splendid courtier in his time, and doubtless a gallant-looking one too, for it was a sumptuous age; but the poor gentleman’s looks have now little to recommend them, as he lies contorted and mummified but perfect in his narrow home, to be gazed and wondered at by those who list—a scoff for the ribald, a text for the moralist.

156More there was, much more, to describe in this wonderful monastery, but I have said more than enough to prove that the visitor to Portugal who misses Thomar has failed to see a relic, which, in its way, has hardly an equal in Europe. The drives around Thomar are exquisitely beautiful, the view from the hill across the river embracing the monastery and the great white sanctuary of the Misericordia, with its long scala sacra, upon the twin hill, being one never to be forgotten. Just outside the town, hard by an ancient pillar marking the junction place of the armies which won for a second time the independence of Portugal from Spain (at Aljubarrota, 1385), there stands the beautiful old church of Santa Maria, a perfect Gothic fane; and close to its west end a strong tower built as a place of refuge for its constructors against the constant attacks of the Moors. Much I should like to linger upon Thomar: upon the quaint garb of the peasants, the picturesque bits of the old Manueline church of St. João in the praça, upon the lovely private gardens by the side of the stream, upon the noble aqueduct, and upon the sweet tranquillity of the acacia-shaded walks; but I dare not delay further, for the carriage is at the door of the humble though hospitable, Hotel União, to carry me on this brilliant morning the twenty-five miles to Leiria, where I must pass the night. As we drove clear of the town the loveliness of its situation came home to one with more intensity than ever. The peaceful stream winding through the plain, its course marked by a continuous line of poplars, the pine-clad hills all around—miles away but in this clear air seeming within touching distance of the hand—the cluster of white and pink houses with red roofs, and, almost sheer above them, the two hills, one crowned by its never-to-be-forgotten monastery-castle with its long battlemented walls, its high keep, and, most striking of all, its gaunt bell tower, with its guard of tall cypresses; whilst climbing up the gentler green slope of the other hill is the snow-white scala sacra of twenty-five flights of steps leading to the gleaming sanctuary of the Misericordia. Above all a sky of deep luminous blue, and pervading all the soft warm air, sweet with the scent of thyme, basil, cistus, and pines.

CHURCH OF ST. JOÃO IN THE PRAÇA, THOMAR.

157Thus, for two hours or more, I drove over a good road, winding round the foot of rising hills, and following the sinuosity of fertile valleys, 158above me grey boulders, around me pines, olives, and sweeps of flowering heather on the red earth. At length, afar off, there loomed a bolder hill than the rest, rising abruptly and crowned by another great fortress, as it seemed at an unscalable height, with a cluster of ancient houses nestled just beneath it. Patience and a scarped road on the hillside, however, enabled us to reach without apparent difficulty half up the hill to the modern village of Ourem, where a rest for the horses and a meal for myself had been agreed upon. The place was dead, basking in the hot sunshine, all the village, as it seemed, baked to the uniform yellowish-white colour of the soil of the hill upon which it stood. The gaunt yellow castle above^[1] softened only by the verdure of a crown of pines, and just below its walls the ancient town and a great monastery of long ago.

THE BRIDGE AT THOMAR.

159The hostelry was humble enough, but a chatty, shrewd-looking, old lady provided an excellent luncheon for me in an upper room, and became charmingly friendly when I praised her wine, of which she was very proud, and with reason, grown, as she told me, in the vineyard at the back of the house, and as good a wine of its sort as I care to drink. She was equally pleased with the approval of her quince marmalade, and pressed no end of home-made confections upon her passing guest, whilst she kept repeating that “os senhores ingleses que veem sempre alabão muito o nosso vinho;” for the approval of Englishmen in this country is always taken as fixing the final seal of excellence upon anything.

Outside in the main street of the town complete quiet reigned in the fierce sunshine of midday. Against the indigo sky the immense castle on its peak showed clear, as nothing is ever seen in our mist-laden atmosphere. A man passes, bearing a great boat-shaped basket piled with big black grapes, the bloom upon them still undisturbed; four cronies in black nightcaps and with long staves in their hands gossip in the parallelogram of black shadow thrown athwart the road by the church tower; and, by-and-by, 160three lithe damsels with bright yellow head-kerchiefs flowing as they walk, swing by joyously; then comes, painfully hobbling beneath a heavy burden of yellow gourds, a barefooted old woman, and anon a man riding à la gineta, a pacing nag with brass-embossed harness, and great box stirrups. Then silence again for another half-hour, and this is life at Ourem.

Still through a land of pine and heather with beautiful little valleys full of vines, figs, and olives, we drove for two hours more, and, just as the black shadows began to lengthen, we drove into the town of Leiria, the Calippo of the Romans, and for long the stronghold whence the Moors harried the advancing Christians to the north. It is a lovely place on the banks of the Liz, set in the midst of pine-clad hills, and the centre of a great agricultural district. Here, again, the two abrupt eminences that loom over the town are crowned respectively by the enormous mediæval stronghold and the religious house that for ever seems to keep it company—the sword and the cross, twin instruments of soldier and priest, to keep the people in subjection, both alike happily now superseded, in Portugal at least, by more enlightened means.

IN THE MAIN STREET OF OUREM.

161I started soon after my arrival at the inn, where there was no particular temptation to remain, to scale the hill from which the castle frowned down upon the town. The townspeople seemed to care nothing for the vast ruin that to me was the one attraction of the place. No one cared to guide me up the steep. It was easy, they said, to find the way by following the path, and the castle ruins were open to all. So I started alone, and wound round the lower ascent, finding myself at last on the side of the hill farthest from the town, and at a point from which the castle was apparently quite inaccessible, as the ascent was almost a sheer precipice. A couple of women and some children were in a field by the wayside, and from them I learnt that I should have taken another path, and have ascended on the opposite face of the hill. It was annoying, for the day was already declining, and I had other things to do on the morrow. Just then an officious urchin of twelve volunteered to show me a way he knew of by the side I was on, and rather than lose my opportunity I followed him across a ploughed field to the foot of the steep.

A rocky path aslant the hill amidst the undergrowth 162seemed to offer no great difficulty at first, and I began the climb. The path, if it can so be called, was continued by other slanting ascents more difficult than the first, but still intent only upon each next step, I scrambled on by the aid of tufts of esparto grass, until I became aware that the track had ended altogether, and that the farther ascent was apparently impossible. Not until then had I looked down, but when I did so I understood in a moment the peril in which I was. I stood at a height of some five hundred feet above the level, and descent by the way I had come was absolutely impossible. For the last hundred feet I had only scrambled up by the aid of occasional stones that afforded a momentary lodgment for the toe and by clutching tufts of grass, but these would not help me to descend. The pine-needles that lay thick underfoot made the slope as slippery as ice, and I knew that if I attempted to retrace my steps I should certainly be dashed to pieces. The poor women below knew it too; for one was wringing her hands in horror, and had thrown her apron over her face to hide from her the coming catastrophe, whilst the other was loudly bewailing, whilst she belaboured the head of the urchin who had been the cause 163of the trouble. For one moment panic seized me, but it was succeeded immediately by a cool wave of critical, speculative interest, as if another person’s life and not mine were at stake, as to the sporting chance of my ever being able to negotiate the hundred feet of sheer precipice that lay between me and the top. Each step achieved was a triumph, and my whole soul was concentrated upon the chances of the next being successful. Of course, the ascent had to be made by long zigzags on the face of the precipice, and again and again, as a stone slipped from beneath my foot or a frond of bracken yielded to my grasp, I gave myself up for lost. But I never glanced below, and the jagged and frowning battlements above me gradually drew nearer and nearer, until at last, I know not how, I stood beneath them, panting but safe, and then, looking from the giddy height to the field below, I saw quite a large group of peasants now, waving their black nightcaps, and shouting in token of rejoicing at my safety.

The great castle around me, built by King Diniz the Farmer, in the thirteenth century, upon the site of the Moorish stronghold, was of immense extent, and included ruins of residential 164edifices of later mediæval times. As I saw it now it was a dream of beauty. The setting sun falling athwart its lichen-covered stones dyed them as red as blood. Within the vast crenellated walls two distinct castles stood, one the cyclopean early structure, and the other a lovely Gothic palace, whose ogival windows, pointed arches, and slender pillars were still graceful in decay. The dismantled chapel is exquisite, and if light had served or any intelligent guidance had been obtainable, the inscriptions in it would have been interesting. But the twilight was falling, and the magnificent view from the battlements over the town, the plain, and the mountains called to me.

THE CASTLE, LEIRIA.

It was a feast of loveliness to the eye. The golden light of the setting sun glorified the vast plain below me, with its silver river fringed by poplars winding through it for many a mile, and the hills in the distance clothed to the crests with lofty pines, black and solemn now in the fading light. On a hill adjoining that upon which I stood the great white Convent and Sanctuary of the Incarnation looks across at the crumbling castle that it has outlived; and, just below me, between the inner and outer defences of the 165stronghold, on a green grassy slope, some children are playing joyously. As I wander down the way, safe and easy on this side, through mighty donjons, and thick, tunnelled walls which have seen so many bloody sights and echoed so many dismal sounds, the very spirit of peace seems to pervade the place. Half-way down, leaning over one of the grim walls, was a beautiful peasant girl talking to her young lover, who stood at the foot, and cascading masses of purple flowers fell across the jagged stones here and there, giving the just touch of colour needed to perfect the scene. Past a quaint old desecrated church and the enormous monastery of St. Peter, now, like most of such places, a barrack, I tread the picturesque praça of the town again, and stroll along the fine avenue of planes and eucalyptus by the side of the river as the after-glow lights up the cliff and the castle with a pearly reflected glamour. The hill from below is like that of Edinburgh, but apparently double as high, and the vast extent of the battlements is more evident than when seen on the summit. Huge buttresses of rock seem to sustain the curtain that connects the keep of the fortress with the Gothic palace, and everywhere the grey of the granite is covered 166with a patina of yellow lichen, and the crevices filled with yew, aloes, and olives.

ON THE ALAMEDA, LEIRIA.

The next day was market-day at Leiria, and long before dawn the town was busy. This was by far the largest country market I saw in Portugal, and the gathering of peasantry the quaintest and most picturesque. The shops, particularly those in the mosaic-paved praça, are mainly wholesale warehouses for the supply of village traders, and a very extensive distributing trade must be done. The town itself, on this occasion, was one vast emporium, and multitudes of people bargained from early morning till past midday in the acacia avenues under the brilliant dark-blue sky. A gay-looking crowd they were: for the costume here is quite distinct. The women invariably wear a velvet pork-pie hat over a yellow or red head-kerchief, of which the ends hang down the back, and the older women have full black cloaks with hoods, whilst most of them have a broad band, some nine inches wide, of yellow cloth round the bottom of the skirt. The wares exposed for sale were infinite. In the praça great heaps of maize, grapes, potatoes, chestnuts, and beans covered the mosaic pavement, whilst stalls displayed calicoes and 167cloths of vivid colours. Giant yellow gourds in high piles lined the footpath, and elsewhere under the shade of the trees stacks of grass-fodder and maize-leaves for cattle stood. In another space heaps of salt, and long lines of stalls for the sale of salted sardines and salted pork, were followed by a score of temporary butchers’ shops. Then came stands for the sale of fresh fish, skate, sardines, and cod, with the inevitable bacalhau; and farther on, spread upon the ground, were hundreds of homely crocks, red amphoræ, slender and beautiful in shape, coarse household dishes gaudily decorated, and unglazed jars to keep water cool. Beneath a beautiful picturesque arcade of ancient arches in the praça women were seated before panniers piled with pears, figs, apples, melons, and grapes, such as Covent Garden might glory in; and hard by strings of garlic, onions, and eschalot claimed their purchasers. In a field by the side of the river long lines of oxen, horses, and asses were for sale, and men in red and green nightcaps, and trousers made of two or three different coloured cloths, soberly bargained for the beasts. Over all was the dark-blue arch of the sky, and the brilliant sun, tempered beneath the trees by the light-green of the acacia leaves: 168but what strikes most an observer who is familiar with the south, is the absence of vociferation and apparent excitement. There was no shouting, no pushing or quarrelling, and every transaction in the chaffering town seemed to be got through with serious deliberation. Even the cluster of gaily-dressed women around the stately sixteenth-century fountain adjoining the hotel, gossiped staidly, and the children playing beneath the trees were as grave as little judges. This is Leiria as I saw it on market-day; but long before sunset the country people trudged homeward again; the ox-wains carried away the produce and merchandise; the stalls and booths folded their canvas sides and disappeared, and the next morning Leiria resumed its habitual sleep, from which it awakens but once a week.

THE ENCARNAÇÃO, LEIRIA.

VI BATALHA AND ALCOBAÇA

I drove out of Leiria in the morning just as the business of the market was in full swing; and for the first half-hour of the upward way amidst a country of vines and olives, we met crowds of country people riding into the town on heavily laden asses. Then, mounting high above the plain, we passed into the region of pines and heather, where the warm but invigorating air came charged with the scent of thyme, lavender, and rosemary. At a point of the road, about eight miles from Leiria, a deep hollow opens to the left, and at the bottom of it, and reached by a downhill road running almost parallel with the way we came, lies the world-famed abbey of Batalha, the wonder and envy of ecclesiastical architects for six centuries, and even now, dismantled and bedevilled as it is, one of the most beautiful Gothic structures in existence.

Before its west front I stand lost in admiration. 170The whole edifice is built of a marble-like limestone, which time has turned to a beautiful soft yellowish cream colour, similar to that of an old Japanese ivory carving. Like most Portuguese cathedrals the body of the church is somewhat narrow; but in this case a large chapel on the north side extends the apparent width of the exterior west front. How can one hope to convey in written words an adequate impression of this exquisite façade? To the severe perpendicular parallel lines over the door and window, reminiscent of the west front of Lincoln, is added a lace-like elaboration of parapets, pinnacles, and glorious flying buttresses, which almost bewilders by its aerial gaiety and transparent richness. A beautiful Gothic breastrail stands before a double flight of steps leading down to the west door, for the abbey is lower even than the road before it; “the portal,” wrote William Beckford, a hundred and twenty years ago, “full fifty feet in height, surmounted by a window of perforated marble of nearly the same lofty dimensions, deep as a cavern, and enriched with canopies and imagery in a style that would have done honour to William of Wykeham, some of whose disciples or 171co-disciples in the train of the founder’s consort, Philippa of Lancaster, had probably designed it.”

To me this door presented itself rather more in detail. I saw a portal the whole width of the nave-space, the deep, bevilled sides being occupied by the Twelve Apostles standing under rich Gothic canopies, and from the capitals above them a slightly pointed arch sprang ending in a floreated cross finial, the arch itself being composed of six orders, each occupied by a row of Kings of the House of David under exquisite Gothic canopies. The great window above is full of tracery so intricate and plastic in appearance as almost to banish the impression of a work in stone. The octagonal lantern of the side chapel is supported by flying buttresses of indescribable grace and lightness, and is fronted by a screen pierced with three Gothic windows almost level with the main west front; and upon every point of the building and along each side of the roof of the nave crocketed pinnacles rise, supported by fairy flying buttresses—the effect of the whole exterior from the west front being an exquisite blending of seriousness and exuberant rejoicing.

And these were precisely the feelings that 172prompted the establishment here of the Dominican abbey at the instance of its English foundress, Philippa of Lancaster, daughter of John of Gaunt, married in 1386 John, the Master of Avis, the high-minded and patriotic bastard of the royal house, who had successfully resisted Spanish aggression the year before, and, with the assistance of the English archers at Aljubarrota, had gained for himself the crown of Portugal. Here in the neighbourhood of the battle, at the instance of Philippa, was built this abbey of Dominican monks in devotional thankfulness for the signal victory, and for the rescue of the King from threatened death. All through the older portion of the building the English Plantagenet influence is predominant, and marks the abbey as being entirely different from all other ecclesiastical buildings in Portugal.

The monastery was always a poorly endowed one, in glaring contrast to the neighbouring Cistercian house of Alcobaça, one of the richest monastic houses in the world. Beckford, in his humorous description of his visit to both houses in 1782, draws a lively comparison between the two. Accompanied by two great Portuguese 173prelates, of whom he makes merciless fun, he had gone to see Alcobaça at the wish of the Prince Regent. His great train of servants and attendants had been received with lavish splendour and Gargantuan gluttony at Alcobaça, and on the way with the prelate of the latter house to visit Batalha, the whole party had got drunk at Aljubarrota, whose wine is famous. They arrived at Batalha at night.

“Whilst our sumpter mules were unloading, and ham and pies and sausages were rolling out of plethoric hampers, I thought these poor monks looked on rather enviously. My more fortunate companions—no wretched cadets of the mortification family these, but the true elder sons of fat mother church—could hardly conceal their sneers of conscious superiority. A contrast so strongly marked amused me not a little.... The Batalha prior and his assistants looked quite astounded when they saw the gauze-curtained bed and the Grand Prior’s fringed pillow, and the Prior of St. Vincent’s superb coverlid, and basins and ewers and other utensils of glittering silver being carried in. Poor souls! they hardly knew what to do or say or be at—one running to the right, another to the left—one tucking up his flowing garments to run faster, and another rebuking him for such a deviation from monastic decorum.”

I have in my library a manuscript account by Lord Strathmore of the visit he paid to the two monasteries twenty years before Beckford, and his account of the poverty of Batalha in 174comparison with Alcobaça is more emphatic still. He says:—

“Though far from rich, they received us with great hospitality. The prior, an exceedingly good, kind, old man, exerted his utmost efforts to do us honour, and had a cook sent to him from the Bishop of Leria upon ye occasion. We here with many thanks dismist our militia, who had been mounting guard hitherto at ye door of our apartment. This convent is of ye most elaborate and exquisite Gothic architecture I ever saw, one part being left imperfect, being so beautiful that nobody dar’d to finish it. When we took leave of our old prior next morning ye only request he made us was that we would relate to ye minister how much their fabric had suffered by the earthquake [i.e. of 1755], and how much they needed ye King’s assistance to repair it: whereas I could not help observing that every one of our friends who had been particularly assiduous about us at Alcobaça desired us to remember their names particularly at Lisbon.”

Alas! priors and monks, rich and poor, have all gone now, and the place is a “national monument,” with hardly a pretence of being a place of worship.

The interior of the church is almost severe in its plainness, the lofty narrow nave being divided by clustered pillars arranged in a somewhat peculiar manner; the three pillars facing the nave supporting the groins of the main roof, whilst from the remaining three spring the groining of the aisle. Before 175the high altar, and close to the steps, are two magnificent tombs side by side, the recumbent figures upon them hand in hand; the male in full armour, the woman clasping a book. “Hic Jacet Eduardus I., Port. et Alg., Rex et Regina, Elenora Uxor Ejus,” runs the inscription around the fillet; and this is the tomb of the unhappy Duarte, son of John the Great and Philippa of Lancaster, who died of a broken heart, whilst still young, at the disaster to his arms and house in the defeat of his crusading attack upon Tangier.

As Beckford saw the church during service it must have throbbed with the life and colour that it now lacks.

“There is greater plainness [i.e. than Winchester], less panelling, and fewer intersections in the vaulted roof: but the utmost richness of hue, at this time of day at least, was not wanting. No tapestry however rich, no painting however vivid, could equal the gorgeousness of the tint, the splendour of the golden and ruby light which streamed forth from the long series of stained glass windows: it played, flickering about in all directions on pavement and on roof, casting over every object myriads of glowing mellow shadows, ever in undulating motion, like the reflection of branches swayed to and fro in the breeze. We all partook of these gorgeous tints, the white monastic garments of my conductors seemed as it were embroidered with the brightest flowers of paradise, and our whole procession kept advancing invested with celestial colours.”

176Iconoclasm and war have wrought their fell work upon Batalha since then; but still the lovely fane stands materially uninjured. The transept-chapels and sacristy are fine, especially the latter, though the seventeenth-century carved woodwork matches ill with the exquisite pure Gothic groining of the roof, and the great yellow sarcophagus of Diego Lopez de Souza, master of the Order of Christ, in the adjoining chapel of St. Barbara, is a remarkable piece of sixteenth-century work.

One of the great glories of Batalha is the side chapel already mentioned, the octagonal “chapel of the Founder.” The arrangement of it and its general effect are strikingly like those of Queen Victoria’s mausoleum at Frogmore. In the centre, standing high and imposing in all the pomp of Gothic tracery, are the twin tombs of John the Great and his English wife, their sculptured effigies hand in hand as the noble pair went through life; and around the chapel are ranged the sarcophagi of their sons Pedro, João, Fernando (who chivalrously passed all the best years of his life a hostage to the Moor), and, the greatest of them all, the Prince Dom Henrique the Navigator, who made Portugal 177a world power. Upon each stone coffin are carved the insignia of the Garter and the arms of England quartered with those of Portugal, and along the fillets run the quaint mottoes that each royal personage adopted for his device. Some of them are enigmatical; such as that which consists of the repetition of the word “Désir” alternating with the scale of justice, and the other that offers the riddle of “VII.,” a cogwheel, and “Jamais” repeated again and again. “Pro rege pro grege,” on the other hand, if hackneyed, is still quite intelligible.

“All these princes,” says Beckford, “in whom the high bearing of their intrepid father and the exemplary virtues and strong sense of their mother were united, repose after their toil and suffering in this secluded chapel, which, indeed, looks a place of rest and holy quietude; the light equally diffused, forms, as it were, a tranquil atmosphere, such as might be imagined worthy to surround the predestined to happiness in a future world. I withdrew from the contemplation of these tombs with reluctance, every object in the chapel that contains them being so pure in taste, so harmonious in colour, every armorial device, every mottoed label, so tersely and correctly sculptured.... The Plantagenet cast of the whole chamber conveyed to me a feeling so interesting, so congenial, that I could hardly persuade myself to move away.”

Every word written by Beckford a hundred and twenty years ago of this chapel is true to-day, 178and I could have lingered for hours before the coffins of these heroic princes and their parents in a day-dream of recollection prompted by their noble lives and deeds.

Just outside the door of the chapel, in the pavement of the nave, is a stone bearing the almost effaced inscription that below it lies the body of “Martin Gonsalves de Maçada, who saved the life of the King Dom John in the battle of Aljubarrota”; and one speculates that had it not been for the fortunate deed of this obscure gentleman, this great abbey would never have been built, and the kings and princes that lie in it would never have existed, with the exception of the Master of Avis himself, who would have passed down to history not as the founder of a dynasty but as an unsuccessful rebel.

A door in the south aisle leads into the renowned cloister, and here, the work being of a later date than the church, controversy has spent itself as to whether the luxuriant exuberance of the sculpture is, or is not, in perfect taste. Personally I find the cloister exquisite beyond description, and I care not whether the purists condemn it or not. The sensation produced, 179it is true, is—like all Manueline sculpture—neither purely devotional nor highly exalted, but rather one of joyous delight in the actual handiwork, in the gracious curves, in the kaleidoscopic variety, in the dexterous adaptation of means to ends, and these sensations, though I am told that they are vulgar when produced by ecclesiastical sculpture, I experience in the fullest measure as I gaze at this marvel of human skill, the cloistered court of Batalha. Standing in the centre of the courtyard and looking up at the abbey, one sees three beautiful lace-like parapets rise one above the other along the whole length, on cloister, clerestory, and nave, clear-cut edges of perfect curves against the blue sky. Each of the cloister arches is filled with stone tracery of amazing richness and variety, the cross of the Order of Christ and the armillary sphere being deftly introduced in the fretwork with great effect. This cloister, like that of Belem, of which I shall speak later, seems to mark the purer and less extravagant development of the Manueline style, in which the Gothic traditions have not been entirely cast aside, and only the most callous soul could remain unmoved by its exquisite beauty. From the cloister there opens a chapter-house of the 180same style and period, a perfect gem, although the entrance arch leading to it shows signs, in the lace-like pendent ornament that lines it, of the over-elaboration which finally led to decadence. The chapter-house is thus described by Beckford with special reference to what struck me most—namely, the exquisite groining, springing like palm branches from clustered pillars in the wall, and all centring in the apex of the roof:—“It is,” he said, “a square of seventy feet, and the most strikingly beautiful apartment I ever beheld. The graceful arching of the roof, unsupported by console or column, is unequalled; it seems suspended by magic, indeed human means failed twice in constructing this bold unembarrassed space. Perseverance and the animating encouragement of the sovereign founder at length conquered every difficulty, and the work remains to this hour secure and perfect.”

Close by is the great refectory of the monks, now used as a sort of lumber-room museum of débris; and leading from it the vast, vaulted kitchen, its stone roof blackened still by the smoke of centuries of cooking fires. The humble little ancient cloister of the original monastery still remains, with its rows of cells in the upper ambulatory. Here there is no Manueline exuberance or wealth, only reverent pointed Gothic, grave groined roofs and arches unadorned, enclosing, as of old, the sweet, quiet little garden that more than a century ago aroused the admiration of Beckford.

The Cloisters, Batalha.

181From there the distance is but a few steps to the “unfinished chapels”; but the contrast of feeling between the two places is wide indeed. The chapels consist of a sort of Lady chapel or apse built out at the back of the high altar, like Henry VII.’s chapel at Westminster. A large central chapel with ten smaller chapels round it rise to perhaps half their intended height, and roofless, for when King Manuel died in 1521 the work was stopped and has never been resumed. The first view of this fragment, and particularly of the great arch by which it was intended to connect it with the church, strikes an observer with astonishment that human brains and hands could ever compass such intricacy of design and execution. Convolutions more tortuous than those of Arab art, floridness more overloaded than Churriguerra ever dreamt of, boldness for which the only just word is insolence, here run riot unrestrained, fatiguing 182the eye, tiring the mind, and ending by palling upon the senses from mere over-exuberance. The lower portion and pillars, and the exterior of the chapels, are restrained and sober, and this makes the more overwhelming the arches and the upper pillars designed to support the roof. One feels that the design is that of a genius, but of a genius whom another step would have led to madness, and who threw aside all the accepted canons of his art. But, withal, though Beckford avoids detailed notice of these chapels, it is impossible even for the purist in architecture to pass such work by without some admiration being mixed with his surprise. The great arch leading into the church is the culminating point of the work; its western side being a mass of intertwined foliage, knots, cables, flowers, and concentric lines, cut in high relief in seven distinct mouldings or orders, and the inner line of the arch is decorated with a deep pendent open-work border; whilst forming part of the intricate design of the whole arch, the enigmatical words “Tanias el Rey” are repeated hundreds of times on small labels. What the words mean nobody knows, though the most probable guess is that they may be an anagram for “Arte e Linyas” (“art and lines,” in old Portuguese).

“The Unfinished Chapels,” Batalha

183As I walked up the road leading from the hollow in which the abbey stands, I looked back again and again at the perfect loveliness of the building I was leaving behind. The flying buttresses, the lines upon lines of fretwork edging, the multitude of floreated pinnacles, and the glorious Gothic of the west front, all of the softened hue of old gold, presented in my eyes the perfection of a Gothic building. I have seen the stately grandeur of Amiens, the soaring pride of Cologne, the vast magnificence of Burgos, and the fairy prettiness of Milan, and I have worshipped at the shrines of Ely, Norwich, and Lincoln. Each one in its way is supreme and incomparable; but Batalha, reservedly nestling in its green hollow far from the busy haunts of men, has a charm of its own that I have found in no other Gothic church; and as I finally turned my back upon it, I carried with me a memory which in my life will never fade.

We are soon amongst the pines and heather again, driving along an elevated ridge with a valley and bold mountain ranges beyond upon either side, the effect of the distant hills seen 184through the perpendicular lines formed by the straight pine trunks that cluster on each side being very beautiful. A sort of light-blue veil seems to cover the far landscape, such an atmosphere as Corot loved to paint; not a mist arising from dampness, but the azure tint of the air itself seen by its clarity to a vast distance through the dark pine copses.

The first sign of systematic begging that I had experienced in Portugal was at Batalha; groups of children, encouraged apparently by the constant visitors to a show place, making a regular business of cadging: for we were getting now into the centre of Portugal where the people are less sturdy and the position of the peasant less prosperous than in the north. Along the road from Batalha to Alcobaça, a new and really charming form of begging was resorted to by the children on the wayside—chubby, well-fed mites they looked most of them, evidently not in abject want. They kneel on the roadside in an attitude of prayer, their hands joined in supplication, their eyes closed reverently and their expression rapt, like little dirty angels. They have before them a few cut flowers, and the moment the carriage 185passes them they start like a flash of lightning from their devotions, and throw the flowers into the stranger’s lap, whilst they begin to trot by the side of the vehicle in a dogged, persistent way, not articulately asking for alms, but simply trying to win a penny by reproachful glances and disregard of all entreaties to them to stop their dog-trot and go away. Needless to say, such tactics are usually successful, for only a very hard heart could withhold the small coin they covet, when an angelic-looking child of seven has panted half a mile barefooted by the side of a carriage going at a brisk pace.

Half-way to Alcobaça the ridge upon which the road runs narrows to a mere knife edge, and on the left hand a wide valley sweeps down suddenly, a bold long hill rising beyond. This is the battlefield of Aljubarrota, upon which John, the Master of Avis, won his crown, and for the second time asserted the independence of Portugal from Castile on the 14th August 1385. From Thomar he had brought all the power that patriotic Portugal could raise, and upon this ridge awaited the attack of the Castilians, who, if once they could pass it, would have all the seacoast of Portugal at their mercy down almost to 186the mouth of the Tagus. The position is not very dissimilar from that of Bussaco, but upon a smaller scale. The Portuguese right and left flanks were both defended by projecting spurs; upon one of which the English bowmen were posted, and by standing upon the centre of the position it is easy to see, even to-day, how skilfully John the Great had chosen his ground for the decisive struggle, and how difficult it was for the Castilians to succeed. They dared not proceed along the valley leaving this strong force of enemies upon the heights behind them, able to cut them off from their base, and harass them flank and rear; whilst to swarm up these precipitous slopes in the face of a semicircle of determined opponents, and enfiladed by archers on both flanks, seemed inviting defeat. All was against the Spaniards. A mysterious epidemic was prostrating them, the King of Castile was ill, and had to be carried to the battle in a litter, and, above all, the Portuguese were struggling for the independence of their country, whilst the Spaniards were fighting at the behest of a corrupt and unpopular king. So on that fateful morning in August, five hundred and twenty-three years ago, as the chivalry of Castile struggled up these 187broken slopes, the men upon the ridge from which I look down now over the smiling plain, stood like a steel wall, and with mace and battle-axe, and double-handed swords, clove and smote them, whilst the cloth-yard arrows pierced and bowled them over by hundreds ere they reached the summit. The hearts of the Spaniards failed them, and down the slope they fled, delivered now to carnage and to capture. Ten thousand of them, the best fighting men in Castile, fell, the king barely escaped by flight, whilst half his court were taken. Aljubarrota was won, the house of Avis fixed upon the throne for two hundred years, and the alliance between England and Portugal cemented so strongly as to have lasted unbroken to this day.

Through the poverty-stricken looking village of Aljubarrota, where some questionable relics of the battle are exhibited for a consideration (though no one offers me wine, as they did to Beckford’s princely cavalcade), a few miles more brings me to a point, whence looking down on the right side of the ridge the town of Alcobaça is seen below, surrounded by miles of vineyards, touched now with bronze and crimson, for the vintage is nearly over, and a big hummock of a 188building over all, that I know is the famous Cistercian monastery, the sepulchre of so many princes of the ancient royal house of Portugal that I have travelled thus far to see.

The church and monastery stand fronting a very extensive triangular praça, crossed by long avenues of acacias, and the first sight of the edifice is distinctly disappointing. An ordinary façade in the seventeenth-century, Spanish “Jesuit” style of the time of Philip IV., with white walls and yellow stone outlines, and flanked on both sides by monastery buildings of great extent in the same taste, or want of it, did not quite fulfil the hopes which Beckford’s description of the splendours of Alcobaça had aroused. It is true that the west door of the church somewhat redeemed it, for it was evidently the remains of the original front in pure unadorned Gothic. The whole edifice is raised above the surface of the praça upon a platform some ten feet high, and upon this parade the monks in old time were mustered to receive distinguished visitors. Beckford thus describes the reception of his own party—

ON THE PRAÇA AT ALCOBAÇA.

“The first sight of this regal monastery is very imposing, and the picturesque well-wooded and well-watered village out 189of the quiet bosom of which it seems to rise relieves the mind from the sense of oppression the huge domineering bulk of the conventual buildings inspire. We had no sooner hove in sight, and we loomed large, than a most tremendous ring of bells of extraordinary power announced our speedy arrival. A broad hint from the Secretary of State recommending these magnificent monks to receive the Grand Prior and his companions with peculiar graciousness, the whole community, including fathers, friars and subordinates, at least four hundred strong, were drawn up in grand spiritual array on the vast platform before the monastery to bid us welcome. At their head the Abbot himself, in his costume of High Almoner of Portugal, advanced to give us a cordial embrace.”

All is quiet enough now, for the monks are gone these seventy years, and the huge dilapidated edifice behind, forming a vast square, is partly occupied as a barrack, and the rest falling into ramshackle ruin. Nor is anything stirring in the prim little town, which has grown up around the wealthy foundation, and now lives placidly upon the produce of its vineyards.

The interior of the church presents a marked contrast to the façade. The impression produced is one of ponderous solidity and permanence, and the stern devotional character of all the ecclesiastical buildings founded by the great Affonso Henriques, first king of Portugal, in the twelfth century is again conspicuous, though even here a cornice of gilt curly wood 190lines the fine chancel arch. The nave though somewhat narrow is impressive and handsome, separated from the aisles by square pillars of immense size, broader than the spaces between them. From brackets or ledges at various heights from the ground upon the front and sides of these pillars spring the simple arches and groining of the roof, each pillar carrying its arch right over the nave, so that each set of simple groins is separated from the rest by the arch moulding. The aisles, very narrow, seem overwhelmed by the immense square pillars, and it is easy to understand in the face of this stern interior that the notoriously luxurious and self-indulgent monks of Alcobaça did their best to soften the austerity of their surroundings. That they did so to some purpose is seen both by Beckford’s account of his visit and by my Strathmore manuscript of 1760. The account given by Lord Strathmore is worth transcribing:—

“The minister having ... ordered them to do us ye utmost honour they were capable of, we found a large place before the convent so crowded with people that it was necessary for a guard of militia which they had summoned to make a lane for us up ye steps. At ye door we were reciev’d in form by ye guardian and first people of ye fraternity with ye utmost ceremony, and conducted by ye light of torches thro’ cloisters of 191Gothic arcades with ye whole college in procession to our apartments.... Our rooms were extremely spacious, and were hung with crimson damask and gold, ye floor cover’d with Persian carpets, and our beds in alcoves deck’d with embroidered coverlids. We had a basin and ewer brought to wash before supper, and on another salver a napkin of fine linen, curiously pinck’t and strew’d with rose-leaves and orange-flowers. We then pas’t into the next room, where we found a large table groaning under a service of monstrous dishes.”

The writer comments unfavourably upon all the eatables placed before him, reeking, as they did, he says, of garlic, bad oil, and other horrors, and he comments upon the tasteless lavishness of the fare. He then continues:—

“At last, after having drank reciprocally all ye healths that we thought would be required on either side, we retir’d to repose. The next morning we were no sooner dres’t than we found ye whole college assembled in ye next room at our levee. We breakfasted in state, at ye end of a long table with ye rest seated round ye room, and admiring ye peculiar grace with which we put every morsel into our mouths. After breakfast we were attended thro’ ye convent, and had everything explain’d to us, which I must own gave me great pleasure. They are of ye Cistercian order, and ye richest in Portugal, possessing a vast tract of land which is said to bring them in £50,000 per annum. Their magnificence is in every way proportionable. Their church is Gothic, but extremely noble, ye plate, jewels and ornaments, copes, etc. are as rich as possible.... They have no taste or design in their expenditure, and seem to study richness rather than elegance in all they do. As they reign, so they entertain, like princes over the district. In the evening we saw their great altar lighted up at vespers, which at the 192end of a long Gothic aisle had a most striking effect with ye organ and voices altogether impressing upon the mind most solemn awe.”

Remains of the tasteless splendour referred to are still to be seen on all sides. The gilt-trimmed chancel arch, the high altar, with its blue starred globe and wooden gilt rays in the centre, and popes carved and gilt in niches each side, amidst gold whirligigs galore, are as incongruous as can be with the stern, simple nave: and the altars of the north transept and retro choir all present the same features, some of them, moreover, being in a lamentable state of dilapidation, inciting to derision rather than devotion. In the north transept, hard by the thirteenth-century sepulchral stones of Affonso II. and Affonso III., is a dark but beautiful Gothic hall, the holy of holies of the monastery, “the chapel of the tombs,” the resting-place of several of the earlier princes of the royal house.

UNDER THE ACACIAS, ALCOBAÇA.

The most striking objects in it are two magnificent sarcophagi in florid decorated Gothic. The recumbent figures of king and queen upon them, as fair and perfect as the day they were sculptured, rest, not hand in hand as upon most similar tombs, but foot to foot. For these are 193the sepulchres of Pedro the Just and his murdered mistress, Ines de Castro, done to death by servile nobles beside the “fountain of love” in the “garden of tears” at Coimbra, and the faithful king ordered the body of himself and his beloved to be laid thus, so that when the universal trump should call him to arise, the first object upon which his reopened eyes should rest would be her, who, though unwed, was yet his wife through all eternity.

Kings, queens, and princes, whose names now mean little even in the country where they held sway and nothing elsewhere, lie around in tombs of varying magnificence, together with débris and relics of times earlier than any of them. The usual dense ignorance is displayed by the guardian of the objects he is supposed to describe; for he points out two very small ancient sarcophagi, one of them obviously Byzantine Romanesque, and the other probably pre-Christian, and tells you gravely that they once contained the bodies of Ines de Castro’s children. Both of them are centuries earlier than her time, and her only children grew up and survived her. But this is not more absurd than the representation, in the current English “History of Portugal,” of a lady in the 194height of the Portuguese fashion of the end of the seventeenth century as Ines de Castro, who lived in the fourteenth.

The cloister of the monastery presents the characteristics of two styles. The lower part is pure early Gothic, like the church and chapter-house, with simple rose lights in each arch; but the upper storey has evidently been added or rebuilt in the early sixteenth century in good Manueline taste; and in one corner there is a very beautiful fountain in the same style bearing the monogram of the “Fortunate” monarch Manuel himself. The vast refectory, of which Beckford spoke so sneeringly, as dirty and slovenly, is entered by a handsome Manueline doorway, and is now being restored. The entrance to the sacristy is also a fine specimen of Manueline, but inside the bad taste of the late seventeenth-century monks is rampant. All around the great square apartment are carved and gilt niches, in which are dozens of life-sized busts also carved and gilt, of saints and bishop, each of which has a hollow for a relic upon the breast, all now despoiled of their contents; and the precious treasury of jewels, ornaments, and embroidery that aroused the envious admiration 195of the virtuoso Beckford, has all disappeared, many of the most beautiful and precious objects being now in the Museum of Fine Arts at Lisbon, a storehouse of mediæval goldsmith’s work unsurpassed in Europe, though almost completely neglected both by residents and visitors to the capital.

One more show chamber there is in the “national monument” portion of Alcobaça: a hall lined with eighteenth-century pictorial blue tiles, representing in large tableaux memorable deeds of the kings of Portugal, with statues of the kings themselves upon brackets above; the great tableau at the end, representing the coronation of Affonso Henriques, being an exceptionally good specimen of a poor artistic medium. As I walk through the grave, silent church again, and so out into the bright praça, with its avenues of shady acacias casting long shadows, the façade of the church strikes me as more inharmonious than before, now that the wonderful glow of the slanting sunrays touch the salient points with fire. The front with its seventeenth-century figures, its Manueline central round window, and its elaboration of outlines, so characteristic of the Spanish “Jesuit” style, are utterly incongruous with the pure early Gothic of the doorway, and it is with a 196sigh of regret that one turns from the contemplation of such a result of wealth divorced from artistry.

The vast monastic building behind the church is squalid and ugly, for the occupation of soldiery does not tend to the æsthetic maintenance of a building. The famous kitchen of the monastery is used now for military purposes, but may be seen by easily obtained permission. As I looked upon it, a bare, great, vaulted hall, with the channel for water still running through it, and the marks of the long line of ovens extending across the wall, I cast my thoughts back at the busy scene that the place presented in the palmy days of the monks, when the flesh-pots of Alcobaça were proverbial through the land. This is how the place struck Beckford on his memorable visit.

“The three prelates lead the way to, I verily believe, the most distinguished temple of gluttony in all Europe. What Glastonbury may have been in its palmy state I cannot answer, but my eyes never beheld in any modern convent of France, Italy, or Germany, such an enormous space dedicated to culinary purposes. Through the centre of the immense and nobly groined hall, not less than sixty feet in diameter, ran a brisk rivulet of the clearest water, flowing through pierced wooden reservoirs, containing every sort and size of the finest river fish. On one side loads of game and venison were heaped up, on the other vegetables and fruit in endless variety. Beyond 197a long line of stoves extended a row of ovens, and close to them hillocks of wheaten flour whiter than snow, rocks of sugar, jars of the purest oil, and pastry in vast abundance, which a numerous tribe of lay brothers and their attendants were rolling and puffing up into a hundred different shapes, singing all the while as blithely as larks in a cornfield.”

Abbots and monks, lay brothers, and cooks have gone the way of all flesh; and of the plethoric plenty of old no vestige remains in the enormous dingy hall. So, there being no fatted calf killed for me in these degenerate days, I wend my way through the acacia avenues to the humble hostelry where a dinner is prepared for me, eatable, it is true, but a sad falling off from the culinary splendours of Alcobaça in the good old times.

Then in the gloaming I drove four miles through woods of pine and eucalyptus, balsamic now in the soft evening air, to Vallado station on the railway to Lisbon. Out of the darkness at about seven there sprang a long spinning factory blazing with electric light, and humming with the whirr of wheels. The “hands” were just flocking out from their daily toil, and filled the black, unlit road with a gay babbling crowd. There was no town near, and the mill was deeply embosomed in the pine woods: this seemed to 198me an ideal form of factory life, in which the house of toil, instead of debouching its crowd of pallid workers into fetid town-slums to fester unwholesomely until the morrow, needed but a step from its threshold to plunge them into the sweet air of the pines and heather; and where the “hands,” though they worked in crowds underneath a roof, never ceased to be country folk. It was but a passing flash and hubbub to me in the darkness of my lonely drive, and the toilers to me, and I to them, but fleeting shadows. But seen thus, there seemed to me something of suggestive possibilities in this hive of what is usually an urban industry, set in the midst of lofty pines, sweet mountain herbs, and far-flung folds of purple heather. A railway journey of three-quarters of an hour brought me to the famous medicinal thermal watering-place of Caldas da Rainha, where in the excellent Hotel Lisbonense, which the proprietor, one of those frugal, honest, Gallegos who are the industrial salt of the Peninsula, told me was the largest in Portugal, as it is certainly one of the best, I ended a long day of overcrowded impressions by a night of delightful dreamless sleep.

VII CINTRA

I had often before seen Caldas in the height of the bathing season, when the midsummer heat made Lisbon intolerable and inspired people with more or less imaginary maladies to get cured. The place then, with its crowds of visitors and pleasant parties, was bright and lively enough; but now that the last pleasure-seeker had fled, and the only people taking the wonderful health-giving waters were the few really sick, and the inmates of the great “Queen’s hospital” adjoining the hot springs, Caldas looked mean and ugly. The drives through the pine forests in the neighbourhood, it is true, are pleasant; but for a fortnight I had been passing through a glorious pine country much more diversified and elevated than these, and Caldas had no fresh attractions to offer me. A visit to the famous factory of enamelled faience, charmingly situated in the 200midst of gardens, yielded an hour’s interest in the inspection of the late Bordallo Pinheiro’s fine sacred figure groups now in course of production for the shrines at Bussaco, and the hundred curious Palissy-like pieces in high relief, plates of fruit, fish, &c., which are the specialty of the factory. But that being finished the charms of Caldas were exhausted, so far as I was concerned, and the train for Cintra claimed me irresistibly.

The first station from Caldas (Obidos), with its little town, nestles at the foot of an eminence upon which another of the stupendous mediæval castles peculiar to Portugal rears its massive battlements, castles in comparison with which most of the English feudal strongholds are mere sentry-boxes. For these Portuguese fortresses were national outposts thrust forward successively into conquered or debatable land; bases for further extension southward and bulwarks against the return of the tide of Islam. Another two hours of travelling brought us into a country of red rolling hills, with a bold granite ridge on the east and a still loftier ridge beyond merging into the blue mist on the horizon. For miles on either side grand sweeps of flowering heather 201flushed against breaks and slides of ochre-earth, touched here and there with the light feathery green of the pines; whilst in the dips of hills sheltered valleys of bronzing vines and little white granges, slept tranquilly after the bustle of the just finished vintage. Soon we get nearer the granite hills before us, and looming over the station, upon a great projecting spur of one of these there frowns another of these tremendous strongholds, from which, running towards the east and south between us and Lisbon, there bars the way a series of gigantic ridges and peaks. Most of the heights are capped by towers, and scored along the faces of the mountains may still be discerned lines and marks of earthworks and redoubts. These are the never-to-be-forgotten lines of Torres Vedras, by which the genius of Wellington finally held the legions of Napoleon at bay, and saved Portugal—and incidentally Europe—from the domination of the French.

All the earth seems soaked and saturated in sunlight and brilliant colour; little ancient towns, like Runa, perched on the tops of cliffs, at the foot of which more modern hamlets cluster, testify to the changed conditions between the 202days when the first need was safety from aggression, and the later times when, the danger of wanton attacking being past, men sought accessibility and ease. Acacias, aloes, canes, olives, and vines spreading down the plain, tell of a benign and equable climate enjoyed in security and peace; a beautiful and favoured land, where nature has done its best to make man happy without making him idle. As the twilight begins to fall we change trains at Cacem, the junction of the small local line from Lisbon to Cintra, and thenceforward we travel due west towards the sea. Before us looms a great isolated mountain, the “Rock of Lisbon,” which seafarers know so well, with its bold outline and its gleaming towers on the topmost crag.

The “mountain of the moon,” and of its goddess Cynthia, devoted from the dawn of time to the worship of deities that, one by one, have been deposed, this long-backed hummock, stretching nearly fifteen miles from end to end and rising well-nigh two thousand feet above the plain, is one of Europe’s acknowledged beauty spots, and, like a human professional beauty, on this 203occasion coyly hid its charms from too ready a discovery by cloaking its summit with a cloud as black as ink, forerunner of the coming night. The gradient of the line continues upward as we wind round the base of the hill, and it is quite dark when the terminal station of Cintra is reached, and after a long drive upward the quaint little English hostelry, known to four generations of Britons, welcomes me to dinner and to rest.

Like the similar mountain of Bussaco, the “Rock of Lisbon” is scored by ravines and dells innumerable, sheltered valleys open to the soft sea-breezes charged with grateful moisture; and from time immemorial the luxuriance and variety of its vegetation have been proverbial. At a time when Lisbon, only some fifteen miles away, is sweltering and breathless within its south facing semicircle of hills, the slopes of the mountain of Cintra are fresh and invigorating, and some of its gardens are a veritable paradise all the year round. But beautiful as it undoubtedly is, Cintra owes much of its fame to its nearness and accessibility to the capital, and so far as English celebrity is concerned, to the accident of several influential Englishmen persistently 204singing its praises at a time when Lisbon was a fashionable winter and health resort.

The village of Cintra lies in one of the folds of the great hill, at perhaps a third of its height up the side: a little Swiss-looking pleasure-town round an open praça, like a set scene upon a stage. A few hotels and shops, a church, the inevitable big stone building at the most conspicuous corner, with the heavily barred windows on the level of the footpath, and the squalid prisoners begging and bandying repartee with the passers-by: at one end of the praça, a lovely ancient Manueline cross upon a palm-shaded mound, at the base of which a picturesque group is usually lounging, and close by, the courtyard of an old, old palace whose most conspicuous features are two curious protruberances from the roof, looking like a cross between Kentish oast-houses, and giant champagne bottles. This is Cintra as seen from its central point, but over it all there towers that which gives unique distinction to its otherwise somewhat trite, self-conscious picturesqueness. Sheer aloft upon a precipice a thousand feet and more above its roofs there stretch the mighty battlements and massive keeps of a huge castle of fawn-coloured stone, a castle so immense as to dwarf Thomar, Leiria, and even Obidos almost to insignificance. Long lines of crenellated walls following the dips and sinuosities of the crest of the peak appear to grow out of the mighty rounded boulders; some of these great masses of rock seeming to hang over perilously—as they must have done for thousands of years—top-heavy and threatening.

THE OLD PALACE, CINTRA.

205To climb such an eminence looks impracticable when seen from the praça of the little town, and yet it is but a pleasant and easy walk up the zigzag road round the projecting shoulder of the hill. As I start in the early morning to ascend the two twin peaks, only one of which is visible from the praça, the air is indescribably sweet with the mingled freshness of the sea and the perfume of herbs and flowers. The way winds upwards between the trim walls of villas embosomed in gardens. Ampelopsis, blood-red now, long trails of wistaria and starry clematis, and large fuchsia trees loaded with flower, hang over the pathway everywhere, whilst masses of heliotrope clothe the jutting gables and corners, and pervading all are the scent and sight of oceans of flowers. Palms, planes, poplars, and firs shoot upward, and around their straight bare trunks there clusters a tangle 206of figs, laurels, mimosa, camellias, aloes, and cactus. On the outer side of the road, as the villas are left behind, you may look over the dwarf-wall down the tree-clad slopes into glens of deep shade, with here and there a glimpse through the branches of a vast sunlight plain far below, whilst on the inner side of the zigzag way, the mosses and ferns, and the pendent greenery of the precipitous hillside, with an occasional break into a deep ravine, exhibit at each turn and step some new beauty of tint or atmosphere. Presently at a turn of the road, after half-an-hour’s climb, you see right over head the bare granite cliff covered with huge overhanging boulders, and on the summit a long stretch of yellow battlements and a huddle of enormous towers. The trees around us are mostly oaks now, and the grey boulders are covered on their inner faces with ivy and lichens, whilst clumps of purple crocuses star the grass by the wayside. The sun is as hot as July in England, but the breeze is delightfully fresh and pure, the sky of spotless azure, and the air so clear that the ancient fortress, still far above us, is seen in all its detail as if we had it near to us under a giant microscope.

207Suddenly as I turned a corner there burst upon my view another and a loftier peak than the one upon which stands the Moorish stronghold that had hitherto been my objective. A crag so inaccessible it looked, as to suggest that the imposing building upon it with its lofty towers was the work of a magician. The royal palace of the Penha is this, piled up rather than built upon a sheer precipice.^[2] Here upon the highest point of the rock of Lisbon was King Manuel the Fortunate wont to linger for hours and days for many months together, climbing up from his palace in the town below, that he might gaze far out upon the Atlantic, watching and praying for the return of Vasco da Gama from his voyage to India round the African continent, 208the route that in two generations the impetus of Prince Henry the Navigator had opened up. There was but a tiny Jeronomite hermitage or penitentiary here in this savage eyrie to shelter the anxious king,^[3] and during his vigils he vowed that if the great explorer came home successful he would build upon the spot a worthy monastery of the Order in memory of the event. The work must have been a prodigious one, for even now the place is hardly accessible by carriages, and the quantity and the weight of material necessarily brought from below was enormous. This monastery like the rest, was disestablished and secularised by the State in 1834, and King Ferdinand, the consort of the Queen of Portugal, and a first cousin of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, bought the building for conversion into a royal palace, as it remains to-day, and here he lived the latter years of his life with his second wife, the ex-opera-dancer, the Countess of Edla. 209Ferdinand altered his palace, in many cases with very doubtful taste, Moorish and German baronial features being liberally grafted on to the Manueline edifice, with the result that the whole building when seen closely is a pretentious muddle, saved from contempt by some of its ancient portions, and by its sublime situation.

The palace on the peak was soon lost to sight again on my climb upward, and the path led direct to the outer donjon of the Moorish stronghold opening upon a narrow path cut along the face of the rock, and bordered on the outer side by a low stone wall. The view down over the steep, rocky slope, with the town of Cintra far below, and the plain limitless beyond, is very fine, and the walls that border the path are clothed with mosses and ferns almost as lovely as those of Bussaco. The fortress must have been impregnable by force; and indeed was only gained at last from the Moors by treason, this very gate having been bought by the Christians from an unfaithful guardian. This narrow path cut on the face of the precipice is the only practicable approach to the fortress, and leads soon to yet another gate flanked by a strong tower built upon one vast, solid boulder. The dells below are 210filled with billows of verdure; the face of the rock on the inner side of the path is covered with creepers, ferns, and flowers, whilst above them, high up in the dips near the summit, great trees lean over, shading the way by which we come. Yet another strong gate tower we pass through; and with a sudden turn we are inside the fortress, on the right of us a ruined chapel, once a mosque, and on the left a watch-tower, with, at its foot, a monument upon which the cross is graven surmounting the crescent, emblematical of the fate of the adjoining chapel.

To describe in detail this prodigious ruin would be impossible in any reasonable space. The summit of the crag consists of two separate peaks at some distance from each other, the higher one occupied by the main keep, “the royal tower,” and long battlemented walls reach from one point to the other, with bastions at intervals and massive square keeps at the salient angles. On all sides within the great enclosure formed by the battlements, covering the whole summit, remains of towers and buildings of various sorts are scattered, amidst the dense growth of trees and brushwood that have intruded upon the space. The battlements, many of them built upon the rounded 211boulders that border the precipice and following the contour of the hill top, are strong and perfect still; and it needs but little imagination to people them again with the turbaned and mailed warriors, sheltered snugly behind them, watching for the advancing hosts of the Christian king, certain that, so long as Islam was true to itself, no force could take this stronghold of their race. The view over the battlements on all sides is tremendous. Just below the walls a Titanic scatter of boulders, varying in size from a few feet in diameter to the bulk of a cathedral, and then the descending folds of greenery, with the sunlit plains and clustering towns below; and there on the west, seemingly almost at the foot, a long stretch of breaker-strewn beach, and the blue line of the sea. The view on the Cintra side is almost appalling, the drop from the battlements and boulders to the town being almost sheer, and on the south-east a great bay opens, and the mouth of the Tagus bounds the prospect.

As I gazed, entranced at this wonderful scene, surrounded by yet sturdy relics of the war of civilisations eight centuries old; musing upon the immutability of nature’s face in comparison with even the most enduring works of man, I 212noticed a wire fixed on the face of the Moorish battlement, and thence to a boulder, and so from point to point, I know not whither—to the palace or the adjoining peak, perhaps. A telegraph wire! A familiar object enough, but, as it seemed to me, strangely out of harmony with the stern battlements from which for centuries the sons of the prophet held back the advance of Western civilisation.

The point upon which the Moorish stronghold stands is connected with the higher site of the palace by a saddle-back dipping considerably and then rising very precipitously. The vegetation on all sides is marvellously luxuriant, and inside the well-kept gardens of the royal domain flowers and plants, temperate and sub-tropical, make the place a horticultural paradise. Through graceful Moorish archways, bright with Alambresque decorations and azulejos, under rocky tunnels and over mediæval drawbridges, all redolent of the gimcrack taste of the forties, the upward way leads at length to the little inner patio of the castle, and here, at last, some of the Manueline monastery still remains. It is little enough, a window here and a door there, and is almost swamped by modern Alambresque and German 213baronial additions, but the ancient chapel in the patio is a gem. The beautiful groined ceiling especially attracts attention, but the pride of the place is the exquisite altar of translucent alabaster or jasper and black marble in the purest style of the classical Renaissance, dated 1532, a thank-offering of King John III. for the birth of an heir. The many groups of figures in alabaster are extremely beautiful, and as the whole structure turns upon a pivot the perfection of the work can be seen in various lights. A concession to the Portuguese Manueline taste of the time is made by the pendent festoons on each side of the altar, which are formed of two lengths of knotted and twisted cable in alabaster, a tour de force of execution, though rigid purists may perhaps question their artistic appropriateness.

The chapel is marred by the hard, bright German stained glass inserted in the principal window by King Ferdinand; but the modern Portuguese is very far from being critical in matters of art, and though hundreds of people yearly toil up the mountain to venerate the holy image of the Virgin of the Penha in this chapel, and the lovely ivory figure of St. John in the sacristy, no one apparently thinks of removing 214the flashing offence of the stained glass window in favour of some subdued medium more appropriate to this beautiful little church. A climb to the highest tower of the palace is said to be rewarded by a magnificent view. I was content to take it on trust, for I had already climbed high enough, and could hardly hope to behold a more striking prospect than those I had enjoyed from the castle battlements, and from the inner patio of the palace itself, which is perhaps the most striking of them all.

As I retrace my steps down the long zigzags to Cintra again, and ever and anon look up at the heights from which I have come, they seem quite inaccessible. Equally, or more so, does the somewhat lower, but even more precipitous eminence called the Cruz Alta, from which the prospect is of surpassing extent over land and sea.

as the Portuguese poem on the base of the cross proclaims.

Everywhere the flowers trail over the walls 215of villas, and the high palms within rock softly in the heliotrope scented breeze. Very beautiful it is; but the gardens belong to other people, and are jealously closed by stone walls and iron gates. From above them, at hundreds of points all over Cintra, you may command views of gardens of tropical luxuriance; but without permission of the wealthy owners you may not enter them. Cintra’s beauty is not free like the sacred wood of Bussaco, where you may wander at your will through purely sylvan scenery that not even Cintra can surpass. The grandeur of the towering Moorish stronghold on its crest of grey boulders is more imposing than anything Bussaco can show, and the interior of some of the highly cultivated private gardens of Cintra are as fine as any in Europe; but, so far as the enjoyment of the mere traveller is concerned, I am inclined to agree with the opinion of those who hold that Cintra’s fame is quite equal to its merits. Beckford had very much to do with it. His friends the Marialvas were amongst the first of the Portuguese aristocracy, and owed the large palace of Seteaes, where Byron and some guide-books erroneously say that the humiliating convention of Cintra was signed by 216the victorious English generals. Beckford’s visits to them and to the court at Cintra inspired him with an enthusiastic admiration for the place, and his letters are full of references to its beauty. To the immensely wealthy and eccentric young Englishman desires and their accomplishment ever went hand in hand, and Beckford purchased a picturesque valley and slopes of the mountain some two miles from the town round the shoulder of the hill towards the west. Here he built an eccentric house, partly in the Moorish style, and here he displayed the virtuoso tastes and exotic luxury which afterwards made Fonthill famous.^[4]

All that money and skill could do was lavished upon the gardens in the ravines and slopes of Monserrate; and long before Beckford died 217the place became famous throughout Europe. Sir Francis Cook, Viscount de Monserrate, to whom Monserrate belonged for many years, greatly extended and improved the property, and his son, Sir Frederick Cook, the present owner, has followed the same course of munificent maintenance of this earthly paradise; with the result that now the beauties of the glens at Monserrate are probably unequalled in their own way. It was the middle of October when I visited the gardens on this occasion, although I had seen it in all the glory of its spring and summer splendour on other visits, and the luxuriance of the vegetation showed as yet no signs of waning. Great magnolias, daturas, and bougainvilliers were in full flower, with roses, clematis, brilliant coleas, and immense quantities of heliotrope. Tree ferns, aloes, agaves, and palms grew with a freedom in the open air that not even the hot-houses of Kew could surpass, whilst the crimson ampelopsis and golden-leaved maples presented gorgeous masses of colour. Some of the sylvan views are perfectly charming; but after all, one feels that one is simply an interloper seeing the showplace on sufferance by payment of a shilling—which 218the owner gives to a charity—and a sylvan scene, perhaps less lovely, but in which I could roam at will, as at Bussaco, would have had greater attraction for me.

Upon a peak opposite Monserrate, and belonging to the same owner, stands a humble little monastery that once belonged to the Franciscan-Capuchins. It is a quaint and curious place, the cloister, a tiny one, being joined to a rock, out of which the cells are excavated. These and the doors and ceilings of the cloister are lined with cork bark for warmth and cosiness in this exposed position, and for centuries the hermit-monks lived and prayed on this peak overlooking almost as great a panorama as the Jeronomites on the high crest of the Penha. Franciscans and Jeronomites are alike gone now; but in this case at least the place has been saved from desecration, and the little chapel is maintained with reverent care by Sir Frederick Cook, to whom the place belongs. Byron and Southey, too, did much for the fame of Cintra. In a room at Lawrence’s Hotel, commanding a fine view of plain and sea, the former wrote a portion of “Childe Harold,” and his references in verse 219to the beauty of the place are numerous. Writing of the cork convent, Byron refers thus to Honorius, a rigid ascetic who in a cave there lived long years in self-imposed penance:—

Volumes of poetry, indeed, have been in the aggregate written about Cintra. Byron made it practically his first stage of “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” and went in raptures over it:—

The poet, in one of his letters to his mother complaining of the dirt and discomfort of 220Lisbon, says: “To make amends for the filthiness of Lisbon and its still filthier inhabitants, the village of Cintra, about fifteen miles from the capital, is perhaps in every respect the most delightful in Europe. It contains beauties of every description, natural and artificial; palaces and gardens rising in the midst of rocks, cataracts, and precipices; convents on stupendous heights; a distant view of the sea and the Tagus.... It unites in itself all the wildness of the Western Highlands with the verdure of the south of France.”

Robert Southey, too, calls Cintra “the most blessed spot in the habitable globe,” and Beckford’s letters are crowded with eloquent passages to the same effect. “The scenery,” he says, “is truly Elysian, and exactly such as poets assign for the resort of happy spirits.... The mossy fragments of rock, grotesque pollards and rustic bridges you meet with at every step, recall Savoy and Switzerland to the imagination; but the exotic cast of the vegetation, the vivid green of the citron, the golden fruitage of the orange, the blossoming myrtle, and the rich fragrance of the turf, embroidered with the brightest coloured and most aromatic flowers, 221allow me, without a violent stretch of fancy, to believe myself in the garden of the Hesperides.”

The Portuguese poets have of course dwelt much upon the beauties of Cintra, especially Almeida Garrett, the principal Portuguese poet of modern times. One stanza by him is cut upon a slab erected on one of his favourite walks in the village as a memorial, and the following lines from it may be quoted:—

When the stronghold on the crest of the mountain was securely held by the Moslem soldiery, before the great Affonso Henriques swept southward with the Cross victorious, the Moorish kings of Lisbon lived in silken ease below in their summer alcazar in the praça of Cintra—a building this full of interest still, though injudicious or inexperienced travellers have caused no 222little disappointment by comparing it unjustifiably with the splendid Arab remains at Seville, Granada, and Toledo. Truth to say, the palace at Cintra is no Alhambra, and should not be approached with expectations of anything of the sort. And yet the place is very quaint and charming as you enter the courtyard from the praça, hard by the Manueline cross with its spiral shaft. The front of the palace appears to be purely Manueline, the elaborate window and door decoration, consisting of twisted cables and intertwined branches, and even the pillars, spouts, and gargoyles are all redolent of Portugal’s age of heroic expansion and wealth under the “Fortunate” king.

It was a regal Christian palace long before his time; for his great-grandfather, John the Great and his wife Philippa of Lancaster, had adapted the Moorish alcazar for their summer residence and made it their favourite palace, their grandson and successor Affonso being born here. But it was in the palmy times of Dom Manuel that the palace of Cintra became the centre of culture, wit, and poetry, where gaily-clad courtiers listened to the wondrous tales of Portuguese explorers returned from Africa and the Indies, and poets 223sang the national epics telling of the opening of the mystic East with its wealth untold to Portuguese commerce and dominion.

Though the outside of the palace is Portuguese Manueline, the interior exhibits at every step portions of the original Moorish edifice unaltered. The vast kitchen, with its enormous champagne-bottle chimneys in the centre, has never ceased to be available for culinary uses from the time of the Arab kings until to-day; whilst the dining-room is pure Moorish, lined with beautiful Arab tiles. Arab tiles, indeed, remain in many rooms, and the chancel of the chapel, once of course a mosque, is exquisitely paved with them. There is a beautiful little Moorish patio too, with its marble fountain and laurels, that might be a portion of a palace at Fez or Mequinez now, so pure and intact is it. The older rooms of the palace generally are dark, for the Moorish architects shut out the sun wherever possible, and the up and down floors on all sorts of queer levels impress upon one the immense antiquity of the place as a dwelling-house.

The finest rooms are the hall of magpies, the hall of swans, and the hall of stags. The 224first-named is a square apartment with beautiful Moorish tiles, and a coved ceiling covered with paintings of magpies, each one with a motto issuing from its mouth saying, Por Bem, “with good intent.” The legend told is that Queen Philippa one day surprised John the Great, who was a gallant lover, kissing a maid of honour and offering her a rose. The Plantagenet queen had a temper of her own, which John probably feared more than the Castilian charge up the slope of Aljubarrota, and the king in exculpation cried to his wife, “Por Bem”; as who should say, Honi soit qui mal y pense. The reputation of John was such that his excuse passed from mouth to mouth derisively, the queen’s sycophantic maids repeating it with such significant emphasis, and so frequently, that the king to shame them adopted “Por Bem” as his motto, and had his reception hall at Cintra painted with the chattering birds repeating it.

Manueline Windows in the Old Palace, Cintra

Another fine Moorish hall is called the hall of swans, of which the ceiling is painted with those birds, in memory of a pair of them kept in the patio below, and given to King Manuel by his brother-in-law, Charles V., as a very great rarity. Another large apartment, with a conical roof, was 225constructed by King Manuel himself, who gave to it the name of the hall of stags. Here the king collected the armorial achievements of all the Portuguese nobility. Seventy-four stags are ranged around the room, each one having dependent from its neck the scutcheon of a noble family—except one, that of Tavora, which the great minister Pombal, in the eighteenth century, ordered to be erased—whilst upon a frieze running round the hall is the following verse:—

The small and plain hall of audience or justice has at the end a seat of tiled brick upon which the Sovereigns sat, and here tradition says the Council met, summoned by the rash young King Sebastian in 1578, to sanction the crusading attack upon Morocco upon which he had set his heart. All his fiery zeal and imperiousness were needed to persuade his nobles to agree to an adventure from which many foresaw disaster. 226But the ambitious youth had his way, and his mysterious fate, never solved when he disappeared for ever from the eyes of men at the battle of Alcacer Kebir, ended the male line of the house of Avis which John I. had begun at Aljubarrota two hundred years before. In this gloomy chamber the die was cast, and with the loss of Sebastian his uncle Philip II. and his descendants became kings of Portugal for a century.

A more modern tragedy was enacted within these ancient walls. The vicious young debauchee, Affonso VI., was deprived of his crown and his wife by his brother Dom Pedro, in 1667; and here in the palace, in a room called after him, the wretched king passed the last twelve years of his imprisonment, shut off entirely from the sight of men. The windows of his prison-chamber still show the sockets wherein the strong bars were set, and a deep groove worn in the brick floor along one side marks the spot where the footsteps of the caged king, as he paced up and down for years before his bars, have worn his enduring epitaph. Up in a little closely barred cell overlooking the choir of the chapel, where Affonso used to hear mass, he died suddenly in 1683.

227The old palace of Cintra, indeed, is full of memories, a place to linger in and about, rather than to rush through at the tail of a guide; although it must be confessed that the guardian in this case does take an intelligent interest in the objects under his care. Cintra, in short, is beautiful beyond compare in certain directions; but, as happens in most frequented show-places, the chief beauties can only be enjoyed by the permission of others, and by the use of a silver key. The beautiful villa-gardens are jealously shut in by high walls and forbidden by gates marked private; the palace of the Penha, a royal residence, is approached with bated breath and whispering humbleness, and the palace in the town, though not now inhabited by royalty, is still only shown on special application. But there is one thing in Cintra that may be enjoyed freely and uncontrolled by all, the finest thing that Cintra can show, the view from the town of that stupendous Moorish fortress on its precipitous height. In sylvan beauty, in sweetness and freshness of atmosphere, even in its sublime prospects of mountain, vale, and sea, Bussaco may rival and, in some respects, surpass it; but the long-stretched yellow battlements and massive 228towers piled upon the eternal granite boulders, sheer up a thousand feet and more over the little pleasure-town and its leafy ravines, would be worth the voyage to Portugal alone to see, even though the gardens of the rich were more reserved and exclusive than they are.

VIII LISBON

No capital city in Europe, with the exception of Constantinople, can compare with Lisbon in beauty of situation. On approaching the city up the Tagus from the sea the panorama presented is most striking; although the unæsthetic Portuguese have done their best to mar it by fringing the foreshore with possibly profitable, but certainly hideous and offensive, industrial and commercial excrescences, from the noble and historic tower of Belem at the mouth of the river, almost hidden in the midst of defiling gasometers, to where the city merges into the country at Poço do Bispo three miles away. Piled up upon a grand amphitheatre of hills, the city rises tier over tier, the river opening out before it in the form of an extensive bay. Away above Belem the vast square Ajuda palace stands conspicuously upon a hill-top backed afar off by the huge mass of Cintra; whilst at the other 230end of the panorama towards the east the ancient citadel-palace of St. Jorge looks down from its height upon the busy river-bank and the central valley running inland, in which the rectangular main streets are cramped.^[5]

The noble Praça do Comercio, Black Horse Square, as English visitors call it, fronts the river in the foreground, the most imposing public square in Europe, with the exception perhaps of the Place de la Concorde in Paris. Previous to the great earthquake of 1755 a royal palace stood upon a portion of this site, and the valley behind it was a closely crowded congeries of narrow and filthy lanes. In my manuscript already referred to of Lord Strathmore’s travels in the country, an interesting account is given 231of the condition of things in 1760, when he saw the ruined city; and a quotation from his description of the plans then existing for rebuilding the portion destroyed will give a good idea of the present aspect, since the plans were executed precisely.

“The prospect,” writes Lord Strathmore, “of this great city rising from its ruins is still distant, as besides ye arsenal there are but three houses built upon the intended plan. The plan of the streets and squares is extremely well imagin’d. There is a pretty broad valley between two hills, running down to ye Tagus in ye part where ye palace stood. Thro’ this they intend to make their principal street, all ye houses regularly built after one model and tirés au cordon, terminating in a noble square open in front to ye river, which is of great breadth here, with old Lisbon upon high ground opposite. The other three sides [of the square] will be surrounded by a very handsome, narrow arcade, with public buildings above and an equestrian statue of ye King in ye centre. The other streets will likewise be regular, and will lead at right angles into ye great street from ye hills on each side. Tho’ ye design is extremely noble ye architecture is as bad [i.e. as before] except in ye square already described. They seem to consider ye front of a house only as a high wall with holes larger or smaller to admit light as occasion requires.”

This exactly pictures Lisbon as it stands to-day. From Black Horse Square on the Tagus bank run the Rua Augusta and two other parallel streets, called respectively the streets of “gold” and “silver,” straight as a line to the busy centre 232of Lisbon, the fine parallelogram, called the Praça de Dom Pedro, or the Rocio, paved with its inevitable mosaic of black and white waves, at the end of which is the theatre of Donna Maria, the central railway station, and the entrance to the handsome Avenida da Libertade, a garden and tree-shaded drive of good houses occupying the whole of the narrow valley for nearly two miles into the suburbs. On either side of the Avenida and the principal rectangular streets in the valley the hills rise precipitously, and when the tops of these have been surmounted a series of sudden dips and rapid ascents succeed east and west. The city is, therefore, a most fatiguing one to explore, as to go anywhere away from the river-bank, which with the exception of Black Horse Square is irretrievably ugly and squalid, and from the streets “tirés au cordon” in the central valley, formidable hills have to be faced. This of late years has been much relieved by a complete system of electric trams, which practically cover the city, and by the instalment of funicular railways and lifts up some of the more difficult ascents.

The city, on the whole, is decidedly disappointing at close quarters. The straight 233principal streets and rectangular cross thoroughfares, with their flat, prosaic architecture, the high white houses all alike, are the antipodes of picturesqueness, whilst the authorities seem perversely to have done their utmost to make the river-side as ugly as Rotherhithe or Wapping. This is the more to be regretted, as since I first knew the city many years ago, great tracts of land have been reclaimed from the sludge and ooze of the foreshore which might well have been treated with some regard for public amenity. The large strip reclaimed from the river, however, almost as far as Belem, has for the most part been turned into untidy deserts of dust, shabby-looking docks, and dumping-places for débris. The utter lack of æsthetic taste is observable on all hands. The terrace before the king’s residence, the palace of the Necesidades, for instance, is upon the brow of a low hill, and commands a splendid view of the river and the opposite shore for many miles on either hand; and yet even here, between the palace and the river factory chimneys belch black smoke day and night, hopelessly ugly industrial buildings block the prospect, and the reclaimed foreshore and docks are as desolate as elsewhere.

234Of the pure picturesque, indeed, little remains in Lisbon; but what still exists must be sought amongst the fisher folk on the river-side, and especially in the markets that have been built on the reclaimed land of the Ribeira Nova, not far from the centre of the city and close to the Hotel Central. It was pleasant to turn into the cool, spacious, covered fish-market out of the brilliant sunlight, which even quite early in the day drove people to welcome shade. The air was clear, crisp, and elastic, and every object seemed to sparkle with light and colour. Inside the market hundreds of people were bargaining quietly, for even here the absence of vociferation was remarkable; servants buying their stocks of provisions for the day, housewives of the humbler class doing their own marketing, baskets on their arms, and women fish hawkers by the score laying in their stocks. They were all shoeless, as usual, wearing under their vast head burden black pork-pie hats over red or yellow kerchiefs, and they have girdles below the hips into which the upper portion of their pleated skirts is drawn to relieve the waist of their weight. Upon the ground, spread around the women sellers, were great heaps of glistening fish; cod, dory, skate, whiting, and large quantities of squids or cuttlefish, which are much liked by the Portuguese poor.

ON THE QUAY, LISBON.

235The male fish-sellers of Lisbon are for a wonder even more picturesque than the women; for here on the Tagus the seafarers of the south are first noticeable, quite distinct in racial characteristics as they are from those of the north. These Lisbon fishermen go barefooted, which the poorest men of the north never do, they wear breeches only to the knee, girt by a crimson sash, and the hanging tasselled bag-cap falls and waves over their shoulder as they loup along with a peculiar springing gait under a long flexible pole balanced transversely across the shoulders, at each end of which a flat, shallow basket of fish is suspended. The vegetable market adjoining that devoted to fish is a brilliant sight in this favoured land. Heaps of scarlet pimentos and tomatoes are flanked by enormous yellow gourds, and mountains of purple grapes incredibly cheap, pomegranates, and big luscious pears jostle piles of humbler vegetables of the kitchen, and some of the groups of bright-coloured produce seem to reproduce the old pictures of the mythical cornucopia 236overflowing with all the best fruits of the earth.

It is a long and tiring walk from here to Belem, but two lines of electric trams go thither, one along the river-bank and the other by the parallel route past Alcantara, and either will serve our turn. Belem is now but a suburb of Lisbon, continuous lines of houses covering the two miles of the route. There still remains, however, something of distinction in this royal village, full of memories as it is of Portugal’s great day of power and wealth. For here it was that at length the dream came true, and those long vigils of the Fortunate King on the savage peak of Cintra were rewarded by the coming of Vasco da Gama to the squat, sturdy old tower of Belem, that had been in his yearning thoughts through so many trials and dangers. King Manuel greeted his great subject, who had brought to his native land the potentiality of wealth illimitable, here in the village of Belem, at the mouth of the Tagus; and as the explorer stepped ashore, the king, overjoyed at his coming, swore to build upon that very spot a Jeronomite monastery splendid enough to be worthy even of that great occasion. And he kept his word; for 237two years afterwards, in 1500, the first course was laid of a building which surpasses all others in its particular style, and in some respects is one of the most remarkable ecclesiastical structures in the world.

A long line of church and monastery adjoining runs parallel with the sea, the conventual portion partly in ruins but now in course of reconstruction, and the eye is at first perfectly bewildered by the richness of the details of the doors and windows of the edifice. Here Manueline architecture is at its earliest and best, before extravagance like that of the unfinished chapels at Batalha overwhelmed it. Here the orthodox florid Gothic and Renaissance styles are leavened, but not obliterated, by the new spirit of expansion and aspiration that found its national expression in what is called Manueline. The west door of the church, where the monastic buildings join it, is extremely beautiful. On each side are rich canopies under which kneel the king and queen with their patron saints, and smaller figures exquisitely carved surround the rest of the door, which is surmounted by flamboyant pinnacles in the Manueline taste. The general idea of the windows, which are 238very large and high, is of a round-topped arch three or four courses or orders deep, each course being set with bosses of a different, but always elaborate, pattern, an outer moulding representing a twisted cable or twined branches in infinite variety, ending in a series of pinnacles, surrounding the window on the surface of the wall.

The great south doorway facing the road and the Tagus, the principal door of entrance, almost defies description by its richness and complexity of ornament, this and the cloisters of the church being perhaps the best specimen of Gothic Manueline in Portugal. Between the two doorways into which the entrance is divided there is a pillar or column, upon which, under a rich Gothic canopy, stands a large figure of a man wearing a tabard. The scheme of decoration is carried up by a series of flamboyant pinnacles and canopied figures beautifully interlaced to the top of the aisle wall. The two great windows flanking this gorgeous doorway match it in magnificence, and one feels on turning away from this monument of human skill and ingenuity that here the short-lived art of the Portuguese Renaissance has reached its highest flight.

The South Door at Belem

239The impression, however, hardly survives the moment when you cross the threshold and enter the church itself; for here you see an interior unlike any other great temple. The first impression is one of immense unencumbered spaciousness. The ordinary arrangement of nave and aisles does not exist, but from the floor there spring straight up to a height that seems prodigious six slender isolated marble pillars, three on each side. They form no continued arcade, although, of course, they are aligned, and each pillar is decorated lavishly in high relief with Renaissance ornamentation in panels, with canopied niches half-way up their height. From the top of each column spring a series of branches like the fronds of a palm-leaf, which, meeting in beautiful graceful curves, form the intricate series of bossed groins which compose the vaulted marble roof. At the west end of the church three low-pointed Manueline arches support the choir-loft, and along the north wall twelve Manueline doorways are ranged, with rich canopied niches above them, whilst the magnificent transept, with its gorgeous ceiling and royal chapels and tombs, and its vast Manueline chancel arch of twisted cables 240and cordage supporting rich canopied pulpits, altogether produce an effect of overpowering majesty.

Here in the chancel repose, in splendid tombs, the ashes of the king, Manuel the Fortunate, and his son, John III., the two great builders of the fane; and here too lie, in a transept chapel, Vasco da Gama himself, and Camões, who enshrined in deathless epic the spirit of exalted enterprise of which the great explorer was the personification, and the Infante, Prince Henry, the prophetic inspirer. Kings, queens, princes, and princesses lie around in fretted sepulchres—that ill-used Catharine of Braganza, Queen-Consort of England, amongst them, here where she passed the long years of her widowhood—but their very names are for the most part forgotten now; and this memorable church of Belem, whilst its daring beauty stands, will remain the shrine of the two greatest figures of Portugal’s golden age, and of the “Fortunate Monarch,” Manuel, in whose reign the vision of the Infante was realised.

The cloisters of the monastery vie with those of Batalha in beauty, which is saying much. Each of the twenty arches, four on each face 241and one at each corner, is filled with Manueline tracery, exhibiting inexhaustible caprice and invention, no two being alike in pattern; whilst highly decorated Manueline doorways line the inner walls. The upper ambulatory is wider and, if possible, more elaborate than the lower, an unusual arrangement, each upper arch buttress being capped by a beautifully decorated finial. The chapter-house, as usual, leads out of the cloister, an exquisitely rich specimen of Manueline, and is now devoted to the stately tomb of Alexandre Herculano, the nineteenth-century Portuguese historian. Pompous as are the sepulchres of kings and heroes in the adjoining church, this monument to the historian—a respectable figure in literature, it is true, but by no means a genius of universal fame—surpasses them all. Here, alone in the midst of this grandiose chapter-house of the monks, the dead man-of-letters rests more splendidly than monarch or millionaire. Modern Portugal, at least, can honour the gifted pen; for the names of Camões, of Almeida-Garrett, the nineteenth-century poet, and Herculano, the historian, are all through the country commemorated by street names. How long shall we have to 242wait before Englishmen, so ready to bow the knee before successful finance, will thus do homage to an historian? Verily, little as we may relish the truth, we have much to learn from Portugal, and not in this alone.

The monastery buildings of Belem shelter twelve hundred orphan boys, who are there clothed, fed, and educated by the State, and it was a fine sight to witness them all at table in the great Manueline refectory of the vanished monks, and pleasant to hear the ringing of their youthful laughter as they played joyously in the stately cloisters. In the museum adjoining there is a collection of ancient royal coaches, some of them very imposing and curious, but generally speaking not so interesting a collection as that in the royal caballerizas at Madrid.

Sated almost with sculptural richness, I left the monastery, and rested beneath the grateful shade of palms in the public garden opposite, with the broad Tagus before me and the glowing blue sky overhead until the perfect day began to wane. Then through the fine Praça de Dom Fernando, with its handsome Manueline pillar and statue of Albuquerque, the great viceroy of the Indies, I slowly wended my way back by the 243chaotic river-bank to Lisbon. Belem is beautiful and suggestive enough to provide reflection for one day without allowing other impressions to disturb it, and the sordid sights and sounds of the water-side were nothing to me, for the airy fancies of the artist in stone and the romantic memories of the heroic days surrounded me as with a mantle.

Lisbon is a city of prospects, and, uninteresting as are its main streets, it is only necessary to stand upon one of its many eminences to see spread before you a wide and varied panorama. The end windows of the upper corridors in the Hotel de Bragança afford a splendid view of the port and the mouth of the Tagus, whilst from the ancient citadel of St. Jorge, and from the dome of the big classical church of Estrella, the city and the rolling hills for miles around are spread out at the foot like a map in relief. Speaking for myself, I have always considered one of the most attractive coigns of vantage in Lisbon to be the Largo da Gloria just over the entrance of the Avenida. This can be reached either up the Rua de São Roque or by the funicular lift from the Avenida itself. The view from this pretty public garden on the top of a 244precipitous bluff is charming. The whole of the central valley lies under you with its straight lines of streets, starting from the great parallelogram of the Rocio just below and reaching the Tagus. Just in front of you across the valley rise the hills covered with houses of all colours amidst greenery, with the great old citadel of the Moors and their conquerors crowning the highest point towards the river; the square battlemented towers of the old cathedral being seated upon a lower hill at its foot. To the left an ocean of mountainous hills covered with verdure and buildings stretch as far as the eye reaches; whilst on the right beyond the extensive Black Horse Square shines the wide estuary of the river, and miles away across the water the mountains that bound the prospect towards the south.

As you stand and look down from the garden of Gloria to the big busy square, with its wavy black and white pavement, and tall column just underneath you, you may notice that at the north-east corner of the square the valley broadens somewhat, and a maze of narrow streets starts from that corner. If when you descend from your eminence you penetrate and explore this corner you will find in it all that is left of the 245quaint Lisbon of before the great earthquake. For here, in a district still called the Mouraria, and in what once was the Villa Nova de Gibraltar adjoining it, dwelt outside the ancient walls the Moors and Jews, who for centuries almost monopolised the wealth of Portugal, until at the bidding of his Spanish father-in-law and mother-in-law, Ferdinand and Isabel, the “Fortunate” King Manuel made short work of the children of Israel. Here in the ghetto, of which the ancient gateway still stands, the streets are narrow and tortuous. Crumbling gables and quaint corner turrets overhang the pathway, and dark mysterious entries, lined with oriental azulejos, tell of the time when men lived in daily fear of rapine and violence.

Almost sheer over the district of the Mouraria towers the hill upon which the fortress of St. Jorge stands, and if you care to climb it you may see Lisbon, and beyond from the point opposite to that from which you have just descended. The cathedral stands upon a hill nearer the river, and may best be reached by following the tram-lines up the Rua da Conceição. The sturdy old church fronts a triangular space, from which picturesque glimpses of the roofs of the old 246town and river-bank may be caught. Two square Romanesque towers, which, like the rest of the cathedral, are now in course of restoration from the vandalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, stand on each side of and connect with a large square porch before the west door. Cupolas and a railed parapet formerly surmounted these towers, but battlements in accordance with the original design are in future to replace them, and the lavish additions of carved wood capitals to the pillars and coats of stucco over ancient decorations are being cleared away, thanks largely to the encouragement of the present Queen of Portugal, who is interested in the work.

Here on this hill stood the mosque of the Moslem kings, and here, when in 1147 Affonso Henriques, the first King of Portugal, captured the city, the first Christian church was built by the conqueror, who nominated an English warrior-monk, Gilbert, to be the first bishop of the new See. Upon a stone within the porch of the west door, the carved legend tells how the Moors were vanquished by the Christian king, and the cross set up in this place, and the twelfth-century round-arched doorway with the grotesque capitals of its pillars demonstrate that this part of the 247edifice at least dates from the earliest years of the Portuguese monarchy.

The interior presents six round arches on clustered marble columns, now stripped of the stucco that disfigured them for centuries, though the Corinthian capitals which were added in the eighteenth century still remain. When Lord Strathmore saw the church in 1760, five years after the earthquake, he referred to these Corinthian capitals in a sketch he drew of the church: “I have left out,” he says, “the large Corinthian capitals and marble pedestals which have been added to the pillars within memory. The fire has burnt most of the capitals off, both of the ambulatory and the nave arches, and the other capitals have been so much impaired that you can only see remains of basket-work, foliage, and flowers.” The intention referred to by Lord Strathmore to restore the church to its original simplicity was so far from being carried out that new gilt wood acanthus leaf capitals were added to these fine old Romanesque pillars. At last, however, the church is really being judiciously treated, and is rapidly assuming the grave, devotional appearance of the early Christian temples raised after the victories of Affonso Henriques.

248The roof is particularly striking in its solid majesty, the middle flute of each cluster of columns springing to the ceiling and supporting a round arch carried over the nave to the opposite column, something like the roof plan at Alcobaça. The transepts have majestic rose windows at each end, and the central lantern tower or cimborio stands on pillars of lofty clustered columns, forming round arches rising as high as the roof of the nave; all this being as early as the first foundation of the church. The chancel is very beautiful early Gothic, with pointed arches, and a gorgeous ceiling, and the little Gothic chapels round the ambulatory are many of them interesting. Tombs and sarcophagi of archbishops, most of ages long past, crumble in dark corners and dim, grated chapels, and two splendid royal tombs of Affonso IV. and his wife are on the left of the high altar. Here, to be seen only on great occasions, rest the bones of the patron saint, Vincent, opportunely discovered by the king, Affonso Henriques, in their hiding-place far away, where, guarded by ravens, they had been saved from the desecration of the unbelieving Moors. The ship that brought the holy relics from the southernmost point of Portugal, for 249reverent preservation, to Lisbon was always escorted by the faithful ravens, thenceforward sacred birds for the cathedral church of Lisbon, where some of them are kept to this day in memory of their piety.

Along the walls of the aisles run large pictorial tableaux of scenes in the life of St. Vincent and incidents in the miracles of the ravens, the ancient blue and white tiles of which the pictures are composed showing clear indications of the still lingering Moorish traditions in early Christian ceramics. It was Saturday afternoon as I mused in the old church, which was blocked and encumbered in many places by the materials of the restoring workmen; and, wandering past an open doorway in the end of the south aisle, I heard the hum of voices. It came from the ruined cloister, where a sad-looking young priest and a sister of charity were teaching classes of little children. It was a charming picture. The bright sun filtered through the half-ruined twin lancet lights of the ogival arches and fell in dappled patches of gold upon the ancient sarcophagi and dismantled altars that lined the humble arcade: a wild, neglected little garden, all abloom with untended masses of autumn flowers and trails of 250crimson creepers, and the droning hum of the children reciting in turn the sacred lesson they were conning. Peace and remoteness from the world seemed to reign in this quiet nook of the busy capital. Here was none of the sculptured glories such as dazzled the beholder at Belem or Batalha; only two plain pointed narrow arches in each bay of the arcade, with a round light above, bordered by a simple nailhead or rouleau moulding. Everything is ruinous and in course of restoration, but devout humility is the note struck throughout the cathedral, from the solemn, restrained Romanesque of the nave to the plain sepulchral little Gothic cloister, where, in the dim sea-green light filtering through leaves and crumbling arches young children learn the letter of their faith.

There is in these Portuguese churches no affectation of the gloomy splendour and mystery which is the characteristic of the Spanish cathedrals. At mass on Sundays the faithful gather, and on other days a certain number attend; but the constant coming and going of worshippers at all hours of the day, and the celebration of mass at one altar or another continuously from dawn to midday that in Spain is universal, find no counterpart 251in the Portuguese portion of the Peninsula. Here, and above all in the north, the priest is not constantly in evidence, as he is in Spain, and his garb is, as a rule, as unobtrusive as that of an English clergyman; for the shovel-hat and flowing cassock and cloak have in Portugal almost disappeared. However religious the Portuguese may be the apparatus and panoply of religion are not conspicuous, and when once mass is over in the Portuguese church, the place is usually deserted.

Although with justice, Lisbon is usually considered an extremely unæsthetic capital, and has not much to show worth seeing in pictorial art, there is one feature, in which, little known or noticed as it is by visitors, Lisbon can boast of unrivalled artistic possessions. I mean in that of ecclesiastical orfèvrerie. When the religious houses were suppressed, and the State appropriated church property, the priceless productions of the old goldsmiths, gifts of devout sovereigns and grandees for centuries to sacred shrines, were not plundered or frittered away in private hands, as happened in England and France, but carefully preserved by the State for public enjoyment. Truth to say, no one seems to enjoy these exquisite objects very much now, for of the many 252times I have spent hours in admiring the collections in the National Museum, and in that of São Roque, I have rarely seen any but an occasional stranger in either place.

The Museum of Fine Arts at Lisbon possesses, it is true, few objects of importance, apart from the goldsmith’s work and ecclesiastical embroidery, and the lack of a catalogue of the paintings—except for the collection given to the nation by Count de Carvalhido—stands in the way of their enjoyment. Most that is worth seeing here in pictorial art comes from the suppressed religious houses and churches, especially the early Flemish and German paintings, of which several are really fine. But the collection of ancient pictures is so lamentable in condition as a whole, and so badly lit, as to make the study of them difficult. Count de Carvalhido’s large collection, which is separately housed in two rooms in the Museum, contains a few good pictures and many by obscure artists quite the reverse, the specimens of the Flemish and Germanic schools predominating. The attribution of the works to named painters is often quite wide of the mark, many pictures bearing no resemblance whatever to the style of their alleged authors. There is, for instance, a 253little panel attributed to Sir Thomas Lawrence. It is called “Seduction,” and represents, in the usual eighteenth-century French genre style, an interior with a young man seated at an open escritoire offering jewels and money to a girl, whilst an old woman watches through a half-closed door. Anything more unlike Lawrence, either in technique or subject, it would be difficult to conceive. Another picture, a large canvas attributed to Zaniberti, an Italian painter, who died in 1636, represents a Carnival in Rome with a large number of maskers and spectators, all of whom are dressed in the fashion of the late eighteenth century, a hundred and fifty years after Zaniberti’s death.

But the wealth of church and altar plate more than makes up for the shortcomings of the picture galleries. Monstrances in gold of great antiquity and beauty, covered with precious stones, are to be seen literally by the dozen. Silver gilt processional crosses of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, some almost Byzantine, some nearly Mudejar in design, abound; chalices of unimaginable richness in pure Gothic and Manueline styles, reliquaries in gold and gems beyond price, and gold and enamelled crowns and girdles, altar crosses, and candlesticks without number, are 254displayed in cases in a suite of rooms commanding a fine view over the Tagus. Alcobaça has contributed the lion’s share of these treasures, but Batalha and many other religious houses have been placed under involuntary contribution; and the result is a collection of early ecclesiastical art in gold and silver that I have never seen approached elsewhere. The church vestments, too, are rich and numerous beyond description; and a large series of beautifully embroidered court dresses of the eighteenth century displays the influence exerted by the Portuguese connection with the far East upon artistic embroidery of the period.

The collection of church property contained in the small museum attached to the Jesuit church of São Roque is circumscribed in period to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; but as the whole collection is derived from the possessions of a single chapel—that of St. John—in the adjoining church, a vivid idea is gained of the lavishness with which the church in Portugal was endowed in the days of the national prosperity.

The church and district of São Roque have always possessed special interest for me. The monastery, standing upon a bluff overlooking the 255valley, was the point of attack when the English under Norris and the Earl of Essex tried to capture Lisbon for the Pretender, Dom Antonio, in 1589;^[6] and, though the monks were in favour of the English protégé, the Spanish musketeers filled the long line of windows commanding the approach from the English camp, on the opposite hill outside the gate of São Antão, and frustrated all attempts to force the position.

Inside the great square church there is an object of interest that first attracted my attention many years ago, and always demands from me a pilgrimage to São Roque, up the hill of the Carmo, as soon as I arrive in Lisbon. Sir Francis Tregian was one of those stout Cornish Catholic recusant gentlemen whose career in the days of Elizabeth I had had occasion to follow in detail; and his persecution and escape were familiar to me, as they are to many students of the religious troubles of the last years of the Tudor queen; but I had never known where he had found a last resting-place. Here in São Roque a large upright slab stands beneath the pulpit on the north side of the church which quaintly tells the 256story: “Aqui esta, em pé, o corpo de Dom Francisco Tregian, fidalgo inglés mui illustre, o qual depois de confiscados os seus estados, e grandes trabalhos padecidos em 28 annos de prisam, polla defensa da fe catholica em Inglaterra, na persecuçam da Rainha Isabel, no anno 1608 ao 25 Dezembro morreó nesta cidade de Lisboa, com fama de santidade. Avendo 17 annos que estava sepultado nesta igrega de S. Roque da Companhia de Jesus, no anno de 1625 ao 25 Abril, se achouo seu corpo inteiro e incorrupto, e foe collocado neste lugar pelos ingleses catholicos residentes en esta cidade, ao 25 Abril 1626.” “Here upright stands the body of Sir Francis Tregian, a very illustrious English gentleman, who, after his estates were confiscated and he had suffered great tribulation during twenty-eight years of imprisonment for the defence of the Catholic faith in England, in the persecution of Queen Elizabeth, died on the 25th December 1608 in this city of Lisbon, famed for his saintliness. After he had been entombed for seventeen years in this church of São Roque of the Company of Jesus, in the year 1625, on the 25th April, his body was found intact and uncorrupted, and was placed in this position by the English Catholics resident in this city on the 25th April 1626.”

257The chapel on the north side of São Roque nearest the altar is the beautifully decorated chapel of St. John. It had been for centuries the poorest chapel in the sanctuary; but with the advent of King John V., at the dawn of the eighteenth century, the new monarch declared his intention of making the shrine of his patron saint the richest altar in Portugal. And he did so, with gifts both lavish and beautiful, an example naturally followed by his courtiers; so that when the Jesuits were expelled, the treasures of St. John, the property thenceforward of the State, formed a museum of their own. The objects exhibited, monstrances, reliquaries, crosses, altar furniture, banners, frontals, and vestments, are of surpassing magnificence; although they often attract more by their intrinsic worth than by the purity of their taste, as, for instance, the silver-gilt altar candlesticks ten feet high, and the great silver repousé altar front: but as specimens of the decorative art—Italian, French, and Portuguese—of their period, they are well worth study.

Lower down the hill stands the beautiful ruined Gothic-Manueline church of the Carmo, now an archæological museum, filled with many 258fragments of the older buildings of Lisbon saved from the ruin of the earthquake that wrecked the Carmo itself.

Lisbon abounds in public gardens of almost tropical luxuriance. The fine plantations before the big classical church of the Estrella, the park of the Necessidades palace, the square of the Principe Real, the Avenida itself, and the pretty garden of the Gloria already referred to, might for the vegetation in them almost be in the West Indies; whilst the Botanic Gardens, especially, can show palm groves to be matched nowhere in Europe, except at Elche in the east of Spain. And not palms alone grow here in a way wonderful in the midst of a populous city, but cacti, aloes, daturas, and magnolias bloom with great luxuriance, and huge tropical forest trees from South America thrive in the open as if on their native soil.

The climate of Lisbon, indeed, is extraordinarily soft and mild relatively to its latitude, owing to its sheltered position and to the prevalence of westerly sea breezes. As a winter resort it has unaccountably fallen somewhat out of fashion of late years in favour of the Mediterranean Riviera, where the climate is 259much less equable and more trying to those in delicate health. The latitude of Lisbon is about the same as that of Palermo, three hundred miles south of that of the Mediterranean Riviera, and the mean winter temperature (December, January, and February) in Lisbon is 10.63° Centigrade (51° Fahrenheit), against 7.79° at Biarritz, and 7.91° at Nice. Not only is Lisbon thus much warmer on an average than the winter resorts now most affected by English visitors, but the climate is more uniform, the diurnal fluctuation in winter being considerably less at Lisbon than at Biarritz, Nice, or even at Palermo in the same latitude. The winter atmospheric humidity of Lisbon slightly exceeds that of Biarritz and Nice, though in summer Lisbon is atmospherically much drier than either: but in the matter of the entire winter rainfall the average of Lisbon is considerably higher, and this it is that to some extent has set English physicians against the place as a winter health resort, although the average rainfall for the whole year is much less at Lisbon^[7] than either at Biarritz or Nice. 260The rains in Lisbon, however, which fall heavily in the months of November, December, and January (a mean of 277 milimetres, as against 254 milimetres at Biarritz and 167 milimetres at Nice), are usually rapid and torrential, and pass away at once.

Snow is practically unknown at Lisbon, and frost is extremely rare. But, withal, equable and mild as the average hibernal climate of Lisbon is, I do not personally recommend it as a residence for those who are forced in the winter to seek a warm, dry, and bracing atmosphere. The smoke of the numerous factories, and the mist that clings about the river and in the narrow gullies that contain much of the town, make the place somewhat depressing. But within fifteen miles of the city, and free from the objections natural to the valley of the Tagus, there are two resorts which are, in my opinion, and I speak from experience of both of them, ideal places in which the unpleasantness and danger of winter in a northern climate may be escaped. It is, indeed, difficult to overrate the attractions in this respect of Cascaes and Mont’ Estoril, especially the latter. Cascaes stands in a lovely bay surrounded by bold, 261rocky scenery, and backed by hills which protect it from the north. A fine sheltered promenade facing the sea possesses a grove of palms more luxuriant than any that Nice or Cannes can show, and the walks along the coast are beautiful. Mont’ Estoril, which is within a mile or so of Cascaes, on the point of the Bay, is of more modern reputation, but is in some respects to be preferred to Cascaes as a winter resort. The train from Lisbon, running along the coast for fourteen miles, lands the visitor to Mont’ Estoril in the midst of a beautifully picturesque village of hotels and villas, grouped upon the slope of a hill descending in a semicircle to the sea, with pines and eucalyptus woods above, and palms everywhere below. The high range of Cintra, and the lower hills on the north and east, completely protect the place from inclement winds, whilst the open sea-front on west and south prevents the sweltering stuffiness and relaxing effect of so many shut-in places. There are several excellent hotels specially intended for winter visitors; and for any one to whom a three-days’ voyage at sea in a commodious, well-found steamer has no terrors, 262this Portuguese Riviera just outside the Tagus forms a winter refuge which it will be difficult to beat in Europe. The climate of Mont’ Estoril is noticeably warmer than Lisbon in the winter, and the diurnal variations of temperature are smaller; whilst the humidity and rainfall, which in Lisbon during the three winter months form its only natural drawback, are very much smaller at Mont’ Estoril. It is, indeed, very rare that mist is seen at the latter place, even when the Tagus valley is full of haze. From personal knowledge of both places I should say that the mean winter rainfall of Mont’ Estoril is much less than that of Biarritz, whilst certainly its temperature is higher and its uniformity greater.

I have dwelt only upon the winter climatic conditions, because it is in this respect that misapprehension usually exists. The spring and autumn climate generally is simply perfect, and from the middle of March onward fine warm weather, with only an occasional heavy shower in April, May, and October, may be counted upon almost with certainty. During the particular tour of which this book is a record, I passed thirty days in Portugal in the 263month of October. Out of this period I saw rain on four days only—namely, three hours of deluge at Oporto, a portion of the day at Bussaco, and two days at Lisbon; whilst in previous journeys in Portugal I have on more than one occasion seen an even smaller quantity of rain in October, April, and May. November is usually wet, though not so wet as at Biarritz or Nice for the same month (Lisbon, 106 milimetres; Biarritz, 122 milimetres; Nice, 114 milimetres), whilst in December and January Lisbon and Biarritz have about an equal rainfall, Nice being in those months drier than either. From March onward Lisbon has a decided advantage over both places.

IX SETUBAL, TROYA, AND EVORA

Tyneside itself cannot be more disagreeable than Lisbon on the rare occasions when really bad weather comes up the Tagus from the west. Smoke of unusual blackness and abundance is poured without let or hindrance from innumerable industrial chimneys by the water-side, and the heavy sea-mist, clinging and wet, holds the carbon in its embrace until the atmosphere would hardly disgrace a London particular at Blackwall. I had stood it for a day, but as I knew I could get away from it by a short railway journey out of the valley of the Tagus I determined to endure it no longer, but to fly to the other side of the hills. The weather was as bad as ever when I started the next morning by the ferry-boat to cross the four miles or so of river to Barreiro, which is the terminus of the southern system of railways for Lisbon. Through an arid-looking country of vines producing the famous Lavradio 265wine, but ugly and poor, on the slopes of the Tagus watershed, we gradually rose to the region of pines and eucalyptus. Leaving all the mist and rain behind us we topped the sandy hills and descended towards the south in an atmosphere brilliantly clear and as exhilarating as nitrous oxide gas.

Portuguese railways are slow, and it took an hour and a half to cover the eighteen miles between Barreiro and Setubal—the Saint Ubes of the English geographies. A clean spacious little town, beautifully situated, is this metropolis of sardines and salt. The days of its saline preeminence, it is true, have passed away—the times of humming prosperity at the salt-pans, when the harbours was wont to be crowded by ships loading salt for England and elsewhere; but still the local trade is considerable, and the great extension of the tinned sardine trade in Portugal has made up for everything, there being as many as thirty-four sardine-packing factories at present in full work at Setubal. Five minutes after we had got clear out of the Tagus valley and over the last ridge, the aspect of the land had changed as if by magic. Oranges, lemons, and almond-trees stretch in groves and orchards on all sides; 266broad tracts of cereal land and dark olive plantations mix with the vineyards, telling of a country of overflowing fertility; whilst long lines of tall eucalyptus trees, with hanging strips of bark, add a strange and exotic note to the scene. This fertile plain descending to the sea on the south is enclosed by high mountain ranges, especially towards the west, upon an outlying spur of which, a great isolated hill, stands aloft Palmella, another of those stupendous fortresses for which Portugal bears the palm. At the foot of the plain, on the edge of the sea, sits the sparkling little town of Setubal, with Palmella, six miles away, looming behind it, but in the marvellous clear air looking as if within reach of one’s hand.

Before the town of Setubal, and three miles away across the estuary, there extends a long sandy spit or island completely enclosing the harbour and river mouth on the south, the only entrance being from the west where a rocky point, an extreme spur of the great Arrabida range, runs out into the Atlantic facing the sandy point. This land-locked haven of clear blue water is one of the most beautiful I have ever seen, especially when entering it from the sea. The climate of Setubal is perhaps the warmest of any 267in Portugal, and the fertility of the country at the back is remarkable, the hills behind it completely shutting off the winds from the north.

And yet the people in this part of the country present an undefinable trace of poverty and hardship, such as is never seen in North Portugal. They are hard-working and frugal, but they are somehow less upstanding and independent in their bearing, and their conditions of life are evidently inferior. The difference is no doubt to some extent racial; for here the sturdy Teutonic and Celtic stocks left fewer traces than in the north: but the land in the south is mostly owned in large estates, and not by the small cultivators themselves, as it is in North Portugal, and this has probably more to do with it. A population of wage-earners is never so well conditioned as one of independent workers, and in some such direction as this, surely, must be sought the explanation for the marked difference between the people of the north and south of a country so small and so homogeneous as Portugal.

The long sandy island across the bay was my objective, and I lost no time in bargaining with the owner of a sardine-boat to carry me across. The boat was a heavy, clumsy craft, as it needs 268to be for the sardine fisheries, the shape of a crescent-moon with pointed prow and stern, a high-peaked lateen sail of red canvas stretched on canes, and long sweeps which worked over a pin in the thwarts, fitting into a hole in a mighty block of wood in the centre of the oars instead of between rollocks. If the craft was picturesque the crew was still more so: the owner, a sturdy old seaman, and his son, a bright lad of twenty, wore the universal bag-cap, when they wore any head-covering at all, which was seldom. The old man had boots as well, evidently more for appearance than use, for he took them off for good as soon as the bargain with me was concluded. A flannel shirt and trousers tucked up to the knees, and girded at the waist by a red sash, completed the costume. The other member of the crew, presumably a hired hand, was a striking Levantine or Greek-looking fellow of about seven-and-twenty, far more intelligent than the patrão or his son, brimming over with eager interest in the expedition, an incessant talker, with all sorts of queer lore and information about the strange place we were going to see. He, for all his intelligence and readiness, had but two ragged and scanty cotton garments 269to cover him, and made no pretence of head or foot covering.

Whilst the boat was being brought round to the stair, I explored the town and found a fine old Manueline door in the church São Julião at the corner of the spacious praça called after the eighteenth-century poet Bocage, who having been born at Setubal is the principal literary glory of the town.

Not a breath of wind was stirring, and the lumbering sardine-boat, with its big sweeps weighing nearly half a hundredweight each, was a heavy pull for two men. But the patrão and his son put their backs into the work cheerfully and with good will, the vivacious, black-eyed tatterdemalion of a crew chattering incessantly whilst he held the tiller; his being by far the easiest job, apparently as a concession to the superiority of mind over matter. No ripple stirred the blue, clear water as we slowly pushed out into the bay and got clear of the town. The air was of exquisite clarity and fineness, with some sort of subtle pungency in it that seemed to blend the freshness of the salt sea with the languor of the lotus land; and as we receded from the shore there gradually opened out 270behind us, in clear, sharp outline sparkling with colour and brilliancy, one of the most striking coast panoramas I have ever beheld. The bay was almost land-locked, and at the brink of the blue water shone the town as white as snow in the sunlight. Behind, in a great amphitheatre, rose the hills from the deep green masses of the orange groves upon the broad plain at their feet. Bright red earth glowed in big gashes upon the slopes, amidst the varying verdure of olives, cork, and pines; and then above the trees and hills towards the west soared the peaks and crags of the great Arrabida range, tinted in this golden morning from orange to ochre and from ochre to violet, with shadows here and there of deepest indigo. Right behind the town the great stronghold of Palmella, upon its sudden hill six miles away, seemed to stand sentinel over the verdant plain and white houses: and there, in the near distance, on the west, upon a promontory of rock forming the point of the inner bay, was another ancient fortress, that of St. Philip, looking sheer down into the sea. Beyond that as we advanced we saw still another castle on a point; and, farther off, the end of the Arrabida range, whose towering peaks 271dwarfed all the lower hills, pushes far into the sea its precipitous bluff, bounding the landscape on that side.

An hour’s hard pull brought us close to the long island. A wild, uninhabited place it looked as we approached it, all blown sand in dunes and hillocks overgrown with coarse rank tussock and esparto. Even before we reached the sandy shore, fragments of walls and broken tiles in abundance could be seen through the pellucid water, half-buried in the soft, sandy bottom; and when I landed upon the beach of pure sand some twenty feet or more wide, a glance sufficed to show that this was the site of a place where many people had dwelt in the long ago. A long sand dune, some fifteen feet high, runs parallel with the sea, and in the face of this dune strong walls, doorways, and ruins of all sorts are embedded. The sand in many places has been removed sufficiently to uncover entire rooms and passages, and the whole beach below is literally covered with broken tiles, apparently Roman, which presumably formed the roofs of the ruined dwellings. The walls are usually formed of undressed stones, with some rubble cement almost as hard, the courses, and sometimes 272corners, being composed of coarse red bricks or tiles eighteen inches long by twelve broad and two thick.

Mounting the top of the dune I saw beneath me the houses that at various times had been excavated, and partially cleared of sand by the successive adventurers, who, for the sake of profit or curiosity, have undertaken the work. It has been done unsystematically and unscientifically; but in the three-quarters of a century or so that have elapsed since renewed interest has been displayed in the place, an immense number of Roman coins, some of the latest period of the domination, have been found; and numerous relics of Roman, and, as I believe, of a much earlier civilisation have also been discovered, many of the objects being now in the Belem museum. Mr. Oswald Crawford wrote an amusing account of a visit he paid to the place about thirty years ago, and advanced some attractive theories with regard to it; but apparently the excavations that have taken place since his time must have been considerable, as some of the most significant features noticed by me were presumably not uncovered when he was there, as he does not mention them.

273The place has been called Troia by the Portuguese from time immemorial; but it agrees in position with, and probably is, the important Roman town of Cetobriga. The name of Cetobriga can hardly be of pure Latin origin, nor is the situation of the place, at the end of a barren, low-lying sandbank, such as Romans usually chose for a settlement. It is known, however, that a people called Bastuli, some of whom Strabo says lived upon a narrow strip of land by the sea in this part of Portugal were of Phœnician origin, and inhabited this coast^[8]; and this at once provides a clue to the original founders of the city. The Phœnicians and their successors in the Peninsula, the Carthaginians, were a Semitic people whose trading depôts were carried to the extreme of the then known world. At first, and for many centuries, purely traders and men of peace, they made no attempt to dominate, but established their factories, with defensive stockades and walls around them in places, which, though unadapted for aggression, were capable of easy defence. It is difficult to imagine an easily accessible place, well situated for maritime traffic, better calculated than Troia upon its 274sandy island opposite a fertile plain for the purposes of such a people as this; and the opinion of antiquarians since the re-discovery of Troia has been in favour of its Phœnician origin.

The later Roman period, it is true, has provided most of the remains unearthed. I saw and measured myself, amongst many other houses, two of undoubted Roman construction, one apparently a temple, to judge by the now empty niches which are constructed round three sides of the inner wall, and the doorway of well-dressed stone in the fourth side. Another house near it, of which the chief apartment was twenty-two feet in diameter, possessed a dressed stone piscina or font in the wall, and what appeared to be a bath of five feet in diameter and nearly six feet deep of rubble and tiles. These houses and practically all the others stood some fifteen feet below the present top of the dune, but in no case has the excavation been completed, sand silting up almost to the door lintels in most cases. On the beach itself near the point, I noticed what appeared to be the base of a hollow tower ten feet in diameter, which may well have been a pharos; and in many places not much above sea-level are 275square cemented tanks, which some authorities assert were used for fish salting, although its suggestion is not a very convincing one considering the position of the tanks.

The largest house that has been excavated is of undressed rubble for the walls, the angles and doors and window frames being squared with tiles, and the principal doorway topped by a flat arch of brick, the pitch of the roof being evidently angular. On the other side of a sandy peninsula facing the south, and farthest from Setubal, a very large villa has been partially uncovered, presenting the same construction as the rest, but with the base of a round tower at one corner; whilst on the point of the beach there is a house containing four uncovered very large square concreted tanks, sunk in the ground some twenty-five feet deep, apparently reservoirs—perhaps vivaria for edible fish. There is no indication—at least to a layman in the matter like myself—that these buildings are earlier than the Roman occupation, though, of course, some of them may have been, whilst a large building standing high at the very end of the point, which the energetic boatman who constituted himself my companion insisted was “the chapel,” is evidently much later than 276Roman times, and may probably have been a Christian church.

Mr. Crawford advances a theory to account for the foundation of a populous settlement upon a mere sandbank. He is of opinion that when the town was originated the sand did not exist there, but has been blown or cast up since. Although the dune facing the beach has doubtless accumulated greatly since the city was finally abandoned, I cannot believe, after looking well at the buildings, that the level has changed more than perhaps a dozen or fifteen feet since the town was inhabited; and there must, I think, have been hills of sand here from Roman times at least. Still it is possible that a thorough excavation would establish that the remains of the Phœnician town on solid earth underlie the Roman buildings now existing amidst the sand. The most interesting object that I saw at Troia is not mentioned by Mr. Crawford, though as it stands at the highest point of the sand dune (though perhaps with a base of solid earth beneath the sand) it is curious if it was not uncovered when he visited the place. In any case, there it is now, the most convincing proof possible that the city was Phœnician, notwithstanding 277the extensive Roman remains of a later time. Upon a square base or plinth there rises a smooth conical column, some ten feet high, four feet in diameter at base and tapering conically to a diameter of less than two at its apex. There is no mistaking the shape of this column or its significance by any one who has studied the beliefs of the ancient peoples and the symbols of their worship. The column is apparently composed of red tiles smoothly covered with fine white cement; and standing, as it does, in the most conspicuous position over the settlement, it seems to prove that the Nature-worshippers, Phœnicians, Carthaginians, or those who inherited their traditions, must have been the constructors of this column supporting nothing. It may be advanced that this sign of ancient paganism would not have been allowed to remain by the Romans for four hundred years after the Christian era; but it is possible that even then the ritual symbolism of the column had been lost sight of or forgotten, and that it remained as a landmark.

I was glad to embark in my sardine boat again, for the glare and heat of the sun beating down upon the shadeless sand was almost intolerable, 278and the treacherous black sandflies, so harmless looking and so venomous, in the three hours I had been at Troia had rendered my face unrecognisable by my nearest friends, and turned my hands to agonised dumplings. So, with a slight puff of breeze now and again to help us, we slowly crossed the blue bay to Setubal where much needed refreshment awaited me.

I was bound for the ancient city of Evora, and I could have gone by train to Pinhal Novo junction, where the train to the south was to receive me. But the plain over which Palmella lords it had captivated me, and I decided to traverse by road the ten miles to the junction. As I drove out of Setubal, with its clean white houses, and gaily decked women in a long kneeling row washing their linen in the river, the glamour of the south was over all. Cactus hedges lined the way, the glistening green of the orange trees with the abundant fruit already showing, the bronzed vines and the grey olive orchards chequered the light red earth; the rolling slopes were thickly wooded to the summits, and nestling amidst the verdure on many hill-tops were glistening white houses, abandoned cloisters, or shrines of pilgrimage. The aspect was Andalusian, as were 279the traits of the people, and North Portugal seemed very far away. Before us always towered the huge castle of Palmella, with its tremendous stretches of battlements and square towers, seen first from one side and then from another, as we gradually wound round and round the base of the eminence upon which it stands. The way is always upward, and on all sides spread below us, growing more extensive as we round each successive rising turn of the hill, is the fertile plain and the sea beyond. Wheat, maize, olives, and oranges grow here luxuriantly, the lower folds of the sandy hillsides are covered with vines, and the rich brown velvet trunks of the stripped cork-trees are all along the way.

My coachman is one of the talkative type of south Portuguese, almost oriental in the voluble vehemence of his manner, and his eagerness to impart information. Ah! yes Troia, Setubal, and Palmella were all very well in their way: but Evora! That indeed is a place. What a pity his Excellency was not going to see Evora. His Excellency replied that Evora was his present destination, and the patriotic Eborense, for, of course, the voluble coachman came from Evora, broke out into unrestrained panegyric of 280his native city. Lisbon was nothing, Oporto was nothing, to Evora; why, Evora was a great city and a capital when they were villages: Evora made Portugal what it is—and much more to the same effect the wild-eyed coachman rattled off with much gesticulation, whilst the patient horses, left to themselves, slowly toiled up the winding road to the town of Palmella, now to the right now to the left, and anon straight overhead, apparently inaccessible.

At length we entered the town, a poor squalid looking place upon the steep slope; and whilst the tired horses rested I climbed the top of the hill to the castle. The tremendous outer defences covered with yellow lichen, and the round bastions of the inner circumvallation, are evidently of Moorish origin, whilst the great square battlemented towers inside appear to be mediæval. The whole of the top of the hill is occupied by the fortress; the outer walls following the contour, with corner bastions on the spurs of the summit. The views obtained from the battlements of the salient bastions are tremendous. The central keep, standing high above the rest, is veiled with mist, though where I stand upon the battlements is clear and bright. Over the vast 281plain spread below me bathed in sunlight dark patches of cloud wander, and, on the south side beyond it, is Setubal and the sea; whilst on the other, towards the north, far away stretches the broad estuary of the Tagus, and the distant mountains loom upon the west. Ancient as the castle is, it shows signs of more recent habitation than is usual, indeed a row of humble dependencies within the walls are still occupied by poor people. The roofs of the principal buildings are everywhere destroyed; and upon the very ancient walls of one portion there rises the ruin of a sixteenth-century palace; whilst by the side of the great mediæval keep is the shell of a beautiful chapel of Romanesque Gothic. The inner gateway of the fortress bears upon it a tablet with the arms of Portugal and the date of 1689; and I was informed by one of the residents in the row of dwellings that the place had only been entirely dismantled in living memory. All is silent and abandoned now; and the great Moorish stronghold which Affonso Henriques captured from the Moors in 1147, the royal fortress of the Commandery of the Order of Santiago, and the seat of the powerful Dukes of Palmella, as the place successively has been, has now become what for 282all future time it will remain, a worthy compeer with the rest of the proud old Portuguese hill-top fortresses, whose sturdy walls dismantled though they be, refuse to crumble into dust. Long may they rear their noble towers intact from man’s destroying hand, and tell their silent lesson of heroic times to a generation that sorely needs it.

As we wind down the hill again from the poverty-stricken town beneath the castle walls, carts of little black grapes meet us winding up the hill for the belated vintage, and through the open doors of granges we see the wide shallow tubs being filled with grapes trodden under the feet of swarthy lads. The air is soft and close as the sun sets red and orange behind the tree-clad hills, and I pass the hour waiting for the train at Pinhal Novo under a grove of lofty eucalyptus trees, whilst the shrill twittering of millions of cicadas, and the languorous perfume in the air tell me that I have left the strenuous land behind, and am in a clime where to strive is folly.

The next morning Evora revealed its quaint charms to me, for in the night when I arrived all seemed gloomy and threatening in its narrow tortuous ways. Under a glowing blue sky and 283the fierce sun the place was charming, and few cities in Portugal, if any, present so many attractions to the archæologist, the antiquarian, or the simple seeker after the picturesque. The long irregular space of the principal praça is lined by ancient arcades like the plazas in Spanish towns, and the people who flock hither and thither under the covered ways are purely Andalusian in appearance, the men wearing sheepskin zamarras over gaudy waistcoats, and upon their heads wide-brimmed velvet calañeses surmount bright-coloured kerchiefs. We have almost lost sight now of the ox as a draught animal, and big mules, drawing a somewhat light waggon, are universal.

At unexpected corners and unlikely angles relics of unfathomed antiquity meet you: a Roman tower built into a sixteenth-century wall, a Moorish arch, a low-browed doorway that may go back to the time of the Goths, though the house to which it gives entrance may be comparatively modern, fragments of palaces and beautiful bits of Manueline are everywhere. For this city of Evora is an epitome of the historical vicissitudes of Portugal, and under each successive régime has played a principal part. Ebora of the Phœnicians and Iberians, Liberalitas Julia of 284the Romans, seat of government of the patriot rebel Sertorius, who here defied the legions of the Cæsars (80 B.C.), Gothic capital of Lusitania, Yebora of the Moslems for four hundred years, and now chief city of Alemtejo and the south—the walls and towers of its Latin and Gothic masters are still clearly traceable, and the mediæval defences still surround the ancient city.

Its modern Portuguese history dates from its capture from the Moors in 1165 by the freebooter Gerald and his band of desperadoes, who surrendered the place to King Affonso Henriques in exchange for pardon and reward; and from that time its archbishops have vied with those of Braga in the north in wealth and dignity. Infantes of Portugal have often worn its mitre, and one of them, Cardinal Henry, the last of his race, became king. It is difficult to realise, looking at this crumbling old city of fifteen thousand inhabitants, the magnificence of which it was the scene in times when the population must have been much smaller than at present. I have before me as I write an account written at the time by an Italian ecclesiastic in the train of the papal Legate, who came to Portugal in 1571, of the reception of the embassy by the Archbishop 285of Evora (João de Mello), on which occasion lavishness seems to have outdone itself. The king’s lieutenant, with five hundred followers and ten thousand armed militia of the province, had met the Legate some miles outside the city, and at the gates the governor and magistracy awaited the visitors in full panoply, with several bands of trumpeters dressed in cloth of gold and scarlet caps, many companies of halberdiers smartly garbed in various uniforms, black drummers and cymbal players on velvet-draped mules, the mayor and aldermen and civic officers with their respective armed escorts, followed by—

“Ten boys dressed in green, dancing a Morris-dance to the sound of tambourines, and then ten more dressed in yellow with fife and drum, also dancing, each one carrying an arch which they intertwined and disentangled with great rapidity and dexterity. Then came ten boys dressed as pilgrims dancing round a drum, and singing the praises of the Legate. Then came ten women gipsies dancing their usual dance to the sound of the drum, and performing dexterous tricks with wands and scarfs. Following them came ten gipsy men with a drum, and placing themselves alternately with the women, they made a very pretty chain. Finally at the gate of the city there were ten boys dressed in white with branches in their hands, dancing round a carrying chair of red velvet striped with gold, which was carried by eight little boys with white kilts, and golden haloes round their heads. They bowed low to the Legate as the rest did separately when they danced their measure, and then all together, the dances continuing all the while before the 286Legate. The archbishop of Evora entertained the Legate and prelates sumptuously at his palace, and the fidalgos splendidly received the rest in their houses. The apartments were lined with the finest Flanders hangings, and the floors were covered with green sprigs and rushes, which is the custom here at weddings and feasts. They usually remain at table two or three hours. Each person has a separate cup, and when dinner is half through the tablecloth is changed. The roast meats are placed upon the table already cut up and covered, and they are wont to put into these dishes and others, eggs, many spices, and sugar. The viands are not sumptuous, but are abundant, and they say most of the dishes are Moorish. They only serve one dish at a time, and this it is that makes their dinners last so long, whilst they pass the time chatting, drinking healths, and helping each other to what is brought to table, they being very gay the while.”^[9]

Of this splendour in the Evora of the past little is now apparent to the visitor, though the modern Barahona palace, of which, and its wealthy owner, the Eborenses seem very proud, could probably furnish forth a good twentieth-century equivalent for it; and behind the closed doors and frowning walls of many ancient noble palaces, now mostly in the hands of rich landowners and cultivators of the district, are doubtless luxurious interiors.

287From the Hotel Eborense, with its sixteenth-century outside staircase and trellised balcony-landing, looking upon a quaint, tree-shaded, little praça, I descend through narrow streets, that remind me of Toledo—streets that for the most part still bear historic names, though of course the inevitable “Serpa Pinto” has modernised one of them. Peace and stillness reign over all, for the sun stings shrewdly; and those who are obliged to be out linger drowsily under white walls and the frequent shade of acacias, cork-trees, and vine-trellises. A ruined church and a vast monastery attached, and now used as a barrack, first attract my attention, for the edifice shows signs of past magnificence, and the white, roofless walls and façade against the indigo sky form a beautiful picture even in their decay. An Augustinian monastery-church, that of Our Lady of Grace, I am told it is; and over the broken portico I read that it was built “sub imp. Divi Joannis III., Patris Patriæ.” This John III. was the son of the “Fortunate” Manuel, and was one of the principal builders of Belem; so that we are justified in expecting something good from him in architecture. The expectation is not disappointed, for the work is a gem 288in its uncommon way. It is, indeed, but little touched with the Manueline taste of the time it was built (1524); and has more affinity with the fine cloister of John III. at Thomar, built by the same monarch. It is, in fact, almost the only specimen I have seen in Portugal of the pure Italian Renaissance in the style of Michael Angelo. Columns, trophies, shields, and decorative statuary, all tell the same story of direct Florentine influence, as apart from the less virile Raphaelesque tendency of the French Renaissance, which is much more common in Portugal, and, indeed, elsewhere. Even in the later decorations of this very church of Graça the graved medallions, festoons, and delicate panel carving in low relief, show that, even a few years after the church was built, the French style was preferred.

It is but a step from the Graça to a splendid church which is deservedly one of the boasts of Evora, and, for skilful solidity of construction, one of the most extraordinary churches in Portugal, if not in Europe. Situated in a wide praça, and flanked on one side by shady groves of cork-trees, stands the great square church of S. Francisco, all that remains intact 289of an important Franciscan monastery of immense antiquity. Adjoining it, until recent times, stood a royal palace, of which this church and monastery were privileged to form a part; and the Franciscans of Evora were altogether very lordly monks indeed. Without a tower, as is usual with monastery churches, the big square building, with its rows of battlemented roof ridges, looks more like a fortress than a church; and from the peculiarity of its construction, it is safe to say that, unless the hand of man or some great natural convulsion destroys it, the next four centuries will have as little effect upon it as the last four have had since its construction at the end of the fifteenth century.

The great west porch extends the whole width of the building in fine Romanesque-Gothic. The arches of this porch are almost Moorish in form, with elaborated twisted-cord capitals; and the peculiar arrangement of supports noticed in the nave at Alcobaça is also seen here, where the great inner supports of the arches do not reach the ground, but start suddenly three-quarters up the pillar, producing the effect of the lower portion having 290been cut away. The double doorway itself is fine early Manueline marble, surmounted by the pelican and young, the device of John II., and the armillary sphere, which was that of his son, King Manuel the Fortunate. The inside of the church is very striking. The immense width of nave (42 feet) is unbroken by pillars or aisles, the side chapels being apparently embedded in the walls and separated from each other by fine pure Gothic pillars on the wall surface, each pillar being carried right up to the spring of the roof and its uninterrupted arch carried over to the corresponding pillar on the other side, the effect being one of great width and spaciousness, as the length of the nave to the chancel arch is no less than eighty-eight feet.

The chapels, some of which are very beautiful with carved figures of the good sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish period, are separated from the nave by a handsome black and white marble balustrade of the same period. The transepts are exceptionally majestic, and, like the nave, of good unadorned Romanesque-Gothic, but the tiled walls and overloaded altars—the latter still greatly venerated by the 291faithful—sadly mar the simple grandeur of their main plan. The chancel is magnificent, with its elaborately bossed and groined roof, and fine carved choir-stalls, the work of the Fleming, Oliver of Ghent, who carved the now plundered stalls for the Templars’ church at Thomar; and over the noble chancel arch again the devices of John II. and Manuel, with the arms of Portugal, are carved.

In the chapels, and especially in one of the transepts, are some paintings of the highest interest; but the light is so bad that it is impossible to inspect them carefully. They can, however, be seen sufficiently well—notwithstanding their deplorable condition—to prove that some of the great mysterious Flemish-Portuguese masters of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries must have painted them. One representing St. Anthony preaching to the fishes is perfectly exquisite in its minute conscientiousness. I was informed that in the bishop’s palace twelve fine paintings of the same school, attributed to the brothers Van Eyck, are kept in similar semi-darkness and neglect; but these I could not see. It is a thousand pities that these art treasures and 292others of the same sort which I have mentioned,^[10] should not be rescued and reverently kept.

A peculiarity of this church of St. Francisco, as of the cathedral of Evora, which I shall mention presently, is that the brown granite blocks of which it is constructed are clearly marked out with staring white divisions of cement, either real or simulated. The effect is one of very questionable taste, but the peculiarity is not a modern innovation, and the series of white transverse lines traced upon the brown background has some attraction from its very strangeness. The story goes that this monastery-church, founded originally in 1224, twice fell down, and when, after the second disaster late in the fifteenth century, the famous architect, Martin Lourenço, was commissioned to construct a new church, he swore that his building, at least, should never share the fate of its predecessors. Instead of a single main outer wall he built two on each side of the church, all of similar height, the space between the inner and outer walls being about five feet or less, and in the lower portion of this space the 293side chapels are accommodated. The two walls were tied together by transverse walls of similar strength and height between the chapels, and upon each of these transverse walls, which are carried over the roof to the opposite pair of walls, similarly constructed, the roof arches rest. The roof is, therefore, divided into six independent sections, each one supported by its own separate walls and arch. As if this were not enough, a similar arrangement was made below the ground, where corresponding sets of transverse walls were carried across to the other side, and thus the whole nave consisted of six complete and self-supporting bodies joined together. Even this did not satisfy Martin Lourenço. He built yet another wall longitudinally along the central ridge of the roof, and a similar one underground along the same axis binding together both above and below the transverse sections from end to end, and increasing the stability of the building by the added weight. All this it is, of course, impossible to see from the inside, but from the praça the top battlements of the four long lines of wall and the roof-ridge are discernible, and the skeleton of the church, so to speak, can be understood.

A door in the transept leads to an extraordinary 294chapel of considerable size (58 feet long by 34 broad), divided into a nave and two aisles, the whole of the walls, pillars, and ceiling of which are lined or constructed of skulls and other human bones, arranged in symmetrical patterns. The remains of many thousands of human beings are contained in this ghastly chamber, probably constructed by the monks in the seventeenth century from the contents of ancient crypts and charnel-houses. The specially venerated figure of our Lord, of which this was formerly the chapel, has now been transferred to an adjoining apartment better adapted for modern worship.

Evora stands upon a gentle eminence in the midst of a vast fertile plain, surrounded by distant mountains, and upon the very summit of the hill, hidden away between narrow, winding streets leading up from the main arcaded praça, stands the venerable Sé—the cathedral of the archbishopric. In a quiet little open space it rears its two solid, square, granite Romanesque towers of the twelfth century, flanked by the whitewashed, monastic-looking palace of the archbishop, the two towers being united by a pure Gothic doorway porch which fills the space between them. The inner doorway pillars are 295adorned by early Gothic statues of the disciples, all so direct and vivid as to put to shame the affected elaborations of a later time. Slabs in the porch over ancient sarcophagi in Gothic niches tell that all this has been restored in recent years; but it is easy to see that here, at least, the restorer has been reverent and has spoilt nothing.

Like most of the Portuguese cathedrals of the period the first effect produced by the interior is that of grave massiveness. The narrow nave and aisles separated by clustered Romanesque pillars, supporting early Gothic arches, very slightly pointed, and a graceful triforium, have all the beauty of serene severity.^[11] Here again, the clustered pillars shoot sheer up to the spring of the roof, and carry an arch over to the other side, and the cimborio or lantern at the intersection of the transepts and the nave is especially striking. The pillars that support it on four sides, chancel, nave, and two transepts, are as bold and aspiring as those of Ely, and seem to cry out aloud in exalted triumphant devotion. To gaze up at this cimborio with its lovely 296groining and its graceful spandrils carried to a prodigious height at one sweep is a sensation worth coming from England to experience.

High up on the wall of the nave there is roughly sculptured the life-sized figure of a man, bearing upon his breast a cartouche with the Gothic letters C. C. E. cut upon it, representing, as local antiquarians insist, the figure of the twelfth-century architect of the building, Martin Dominguez, and the coats-of-arms and sepulchral figures in chapels and on walls are many. One florid Gothic sarcophagus in the south transept is that of André de Resende, a relative of Garcia de Resende, the earliest Portuguese historian, whose house, with its beautiful Manueline windows, still stands in Evora. The chapels on each side of the cathedral are much disfigured by tawdry decorations and curly gilt wood carvings, but several have finely painted altar-pieces, badly lit and uncared for; and one altar, Our Lady of the Angel, against a pillar in the nave, evidently much venerated, for it is hung all over with votive offerings, is grotesquely hideous, with its ill-carved, big, staring doll upon a gilt monstrosity of a stand.

The little choir loft over the west end of 297the nave, like that at Braga, is filled with finely carved oaken choir-stalls, and the episcopal throne, with Scripture scenes in high relief carved upon the panelling, probably French or Italian work of the Renaissance period. The Eborenses complain that the French plundered the cathedral of most of its valuable treasures; but the church plate and vestments are still of very great richness, and I was much struck by a great jewelled altar cross said to contain a fragment of the True Cross. The precious stones upon it amount altogether to 1425, of which 840 are diamonds; and a chalice of enamel and gold of the sixteenth century is a veritable thing of beauty. The chancel and high altar of the eighteenth century, though of precious marbles, are quite out of keeping with the church, and I was glad to turn away from them and linger in the pretty little ruined cloister of the monks, of simple devotional Gothic.

But the exterior of the old Sé after all is more picturesque than the interior. Glimpses of shady little white courtyards, with acacias, orange-trees, and abundant flowers; corners and gateways of ancient palaces, with florid and beautiful Manueline doorways; here and there 298a Roman tower or arch; narrow white streets, almost alleys, with supporting arches from side to side across the way; and over all a blue, blue sky. The bold, long, battlemented ridges of the aisles and nave of the cathedral, and the pointed round tower of the wonderful cimborio, with its eight turrets ranged around it, seem to force upon the mind the dignified antiquity of the place, hardly marred by the modern classicism of the trivial chancel apse tacked on to it. Outside the north-west corner of the cathedral is a Roman tower and arch in perfect preservation, and adjoining it a quaint triangular praça called S. Miguel, gives entrance to a ruined mediæval palace of the Counts of Basto. But, take a few steps to the north of this, turn the corner of the archbishop’s palace and the choir-boys’ college, and there bursts upon your view, silhouetted against the blue sky, an object that draws an exclamation of surprise and delight from the most apathetic. In an open space, almost surrounded by ancient battlemented buildings, there stands alone in the midst a majestic ruin, which makes even their hoary antiquity but a thing of yesterday. A Roman temple, almost complete, with six Corinthian 299columns at the end of its parallelogram and five out of the ten that formerly existed on each side. The supporting wall upon which they stand is of rough stone with well-dressed granite plinths and corners, all perfect and complete, and standing over eleven feet from the ground. Upon this rise the beautiful fluted columns of granite, with bases and carved capitals of white marble, the granite entablature over the pillars being almost perfect.

At what was the entrance of the temple the remains of a noble flight of steps, the whole width of the edifice and twelve feet high, exist, and it requires no effort of the imagination, turning one’s back to the cathedral, to repeople the space before us with figures of the long past. Up the steps to the lovely temple under the blue sky mount the white-clad citizens of imperial Rome. Slaves there are in many, and half-civilised Iberian tribesmen, still, perhaps, recalcitrant to the yoke. Trembling, perchance, for the savage vengeance of Diocletian, they sullenly look upon the sacrifice to the pagan gods, whilst they in their hearts hold with the strange new creed of the Nazarene; for this temple must have been raised in the second 300century after the advent of Christ, when already the trumpet sound of Christianity had pierced the hearts of the Celtiberian peoples, and had awakened vague longings for emancipation from the oppressive unconsoling gods of old.

And I turn back and contemplate the grave old mediæval cathedral close by, with its modern addition covered with flourishing cardinals hats and saintly frippery; and I see there, too, the temple of a creed that is losing its hold upon the hearts and minds of men. For the great cathedral I have just left is as empty and silent now as the temple to the unknown God before me. In successive ages surely the same old yearning is re-born for direct appeal and nearer personal access to God, free from the trammels and man-made mediations with which all creeds in time burden the simplicity of their faith. Here in this temple—called of Diana with no historical warrant—devout souls offered their sacrifice without misgiving; and in the old Sé hearts have pierced the church-raised clouds and reached the Throne any day this nine hundred years. But as the thirst for equal direct appeal for all souls overthrew the gods of the temple, so the same longing empties the great fane that has departed from the severe sincerity of the age that founded it; and thus the gods do come and go, whilst God lives on for ever.

The “Temple of Diana,” Evora

301It is difficult to shake oneself free from retrospective visions when standing between this stately ruin and the cathedral that has supplanted it; but regarded simply as a Roman material relic, the ruin is remarkable. It is of a similar period and much resembles the Maison Carrée at Nimes, although as I recollect it appeared much larger. The temple at Evora is about eighty feet long and nearly fifty feet broad, the height of the columns being twenty-five feet. Behind the temple there is a pretty shady public garden, ending in a balustrade where the hill drops suddenly away to the plain spread out at the foot for miles to the mountains far away. It was a spot which will linger in my memory to the last; and I left it sorrowfully.

Opposite the temple is the Archæological Museum of Evora, containing a large collection of Roman and mediæval relics, found in the city and rescued from ruined buildings; and in the streets still the remains of ancient architecture greet the visitor at every turn. Evora, indeed, is a 302museum of itself; and it is impossible even to mention a quarter of the objects in it that would appeal to an antiquarian or archæologist. Two buildings there are, however, that cannot be entirely passed over. The so-called palace of Dom Manuel is now used as an agricultural museum, and some of the upper portion has been rebuilt in semi-Moorish style; but the lower portion is intact, and is a splendid specimen of early sixteenth-century stonework. The hall is low but tremendously massive, the walls being three yards thick, and the octagonal pillars supporting the simple groined roof in the centre being massive in proportion.

From the beautiful semi-tropical public garden in which this palace stands, just beyond the mediæval walls of the city, it is but a step across the road to the extraordinary hermitage church of St. Braz. A great plague had assailed Evora in 1479, and here a temporary pesthouse was established outside the walls. The bishop vowed that if St. Braz would free the place from the epidemic he would build here a permanent temple to his honour. When the plague disappeared in the following year, 1480, the bishop kept his word, and the present church has stood here ever 303since. The style, in my experience, is unique—Norman-Gothic local archæologists call it—the building being a long, low, fortress-like structure, with six pointed turrets along each side, and with battlemented parapets; the two first turrets supporting a massive battlemented ante-porch, with plain pointed arches and Byzantine capitals, the porch being perhaps a third the length of the church, and of the same height. For a building so late as the end of the fifteenth century, just on the verge of the period that went crazy over the exuberant Manueline, this survival of the Norman-Byzantine tradition is extraordinary.

Evora was all aglow with the glories of the setting sun when I left it. Long lines of lofty eucalyptus trees stretched as far as the eye reached along the railway, the long hanging strips of bark and the bright clean trunks shining a brilliant orange, whilst the drooping foliage was a bright bronze tipped with gold. Wistaria and clematis hung in wondrous bunches and masses over walls and in wayside gardens, and no sign of coming winter marred the beauty of the day. Long rows of trucks and waggons filled with cork lined the way, and open doors of depôts and warehouses disclosed overflowing stores of cork in bales ready 304for transport; for Evora is the centre of this profitable industry, and derives from it much of its prosperity. Over all the gold and emerald after-glow cast its strange glamour; high overhead the deep blue of the sky was just flecked by purple cloud, and the soft scented air was like a breath from the Arabian Nights.

Once only in the four hours’ journey through the night to Barreiro and Lisbon was I aroused from the series of reveries into which the impressions of these scenes had cast me. It was at a station by the way, dimly lit with smoky oil lamps. Some bundles of rags topped by nightcaps lounged about in the gloom of the platform, and across the way a few white cottages stood out from a background of trees and the hills beyond, whilst overhead, through the high branches of the eucalyptus, the stars shone brilliantly. There was nothing special in all this, for the same picture is presented by most Portuguese and Spanish railway stations by night during the interminable waits inherent to travelling by a train whose first interest is the conveyance of merchandise; but what did strike me as I looked was the name of the place: Montemor.

From here, then, from this humble remote 305place, came the man, the poet, Jorge de Montemor—or Montemayor as he came to be called—who set all cultured Europe running again after the preposterous pastoral romances of lovelorn shepherds and shepherdesses, which had been forgotten since the eclogues and bucolics of classical Italy had been voted old-fashioned. From here came the inspiration that made Cervantes write the “Galatea,” Sidney write the “Arcadia,” and Spenser write the “Fairy Queen”: these sweet fertile hillsides and vales of southern Portugal were the scenes which the native poet peopled with the erotic swains of his Spanish pastoral, “Diana Enamorada.” It was a style utterly foreign to arid Spain, for there the flocks had to travel in vast multitudes from desert to desert in search of the scanty pasture; but it caught the fancy of a people sated with knights-errant, and the pastoral became the rage. That Spain itself should have given it new birth was incredible, though Jorge de Montemor wrote in Spanish. The neighbourhood of his birthplace gives us the key; for here in rich pastures and lush, half-tropical valleys flocks would need but little tending or travelling, and here beneath the sunny skies shepherds and their lasses might as 306easily as in Italy be imagined piping, singing, and telling their long-winded love stories to their hearts’ content.

Lisbon was all smiles when I arrived; clear and crisp as if no rain-clouds and wreaths of wet mist had ever crept up the Tagus and put her out of temper. But the big steamer was lying in the harbour ready to sail for England, and though Lisbon tempted me, I could not choose but go. Forth from the splendid panorama we went, past the great white fortress high on the hill, the city piled up on its amphitheatre and set in verdant frames, the majestic square palace of Ajuda looking down upon Belem and its glorious church, and the sturdy old tower rising from the water dumbly protesting against its desecration by the gasworks that surround it.

LISBON FROM THE NORTH.

The next day at noon I stood and gazed over an indigo sea, from whose waves the light breeze lifted the white foam and cast it wantonly to leeward in a shower of diamonds. All along the coast gleaming towns nestled in the laps of the hills. The mountains of fair Lusitania, pine-clad to the tops, were slowly receding from my view, covered with a glory of opal grey and gold, touched here and there where the shadows fell 307with tints of darkling green and lavender, whilst the sky over all melted from a horizon of palest primrose, through turquoise, to an illimitable vault of sapphire. As the lovely scene faded in the distance, and the bold jagged rocks of Spain loomed ahead, I turned away full of thankfulness for the ineffable beauty of the world: but I could find no word to say more than the quaint outburst of the simple-minded priest whom the Emperor sent to bring home his Portuguese bride five centuries ago: “O Portugallia, O Portugallia, bona regio!” Fifty-two hours afterwards I was shrinking from the chill embrace of a November fog in London.

X HINTS TO TRAVELLERS IN PORTUGAL

How to get there.—By railway the direct route is by the Sud Express, which leaves Paris twice or thrice a week, according to the season, for Oporto and Lisbon, via Bordeaux, Medina, and Salamanca, covering the distance from Paris to Lisbon in thirty-five hours—the cost from Paris, single fare, first-class, being 222 francs. The journey is naturally tedious, as well as costly, and for tourists and pleasure-travellers who are not absolutely averse from sea-voyages the journey by steamer is much preferable. The Royal Mail steamships from Southampton and the Pacific Line from Liverpool both have splendid steamers, which run fortnightly to Lisbon or Oporto (Leixões), the voyage to Lisbon usually occupying rather under three days, the fare being £8 single and £12 return on both lines. But for those who wish to visit Portugal either for health or pleasure, and desire to see something of the 309country under favourable conditions the steamers of the Booth Steamship Line offer much greater facilities than either of the previously mentioned companies, combined with considerable economy. I have travelled to Portugal by all three lines, and can find little to choose between them; the newer vessels especially of the Booth Line being in all respects as comfortable and well served as the others, whilst the fare is lower. It is, however, chiefly in the organisation of tours through Portugal that the Booth Line offers the greatest advantages to travellers, the arrangements being such that most of the difficulties of travelling in a foreign country are obviated by holders of through tourist tickets. The system provides for the meeting of travellers on board the steamers and at railway stations by representatives of the hotels, and advice is sent forward of the travellers to be expected. The tickets issued include coupons for hotel expenses, carriages, and all the necessary outlay of the journey from place to place, and, speaking from my own experience, I may say that the portions of my journey that were covered by Booth Line tickets were much easier and less troublesome than those which were undertaken without them. 310I found, moreover, that the people at the hotels were, if anything, more anxious to show attention to travellers accredited by the Booth Line tickets and forward advice than to visitors arriving unannounced. Some of the Portuguese tours of the Booth Line seem extremely moderate in price, including, as they do, hotel expenses as well as travelling by sea and land, and, so far as my experience went, everything possible was done for the convenience and pleasure of ticket-holders.

Hotels.—We English are not particularly popular on the Continent as travellers, though we are better liked in Spain and Portugal than elsewhere. Nor is the reason of our lack of popularity far to seek. We are apt to assume a demeanour and tone towards foreigners in their own country which imply a belief in our superiority, and a claim to assert priority for our own needs and pleasures over those of others. This attitude is worse than useless in Spain and Portugal, for not only is it ineffectual, but it turns otherwise polite and civil people against us. In Portugal an honest desire to please and serve will be encountered by travellers everywhere, almost without exception. But tourists must repay this, if they wish to travel smoothly, 311by cheerfully accepting the best that the people know how to give them, and must not claim to establish a new standard for themselves. The hotels in the smaller towns of Portugal do not exist for tourists. They live almost entirely upon commercial travellers, and residents, business, professional men, and officials, who board at the hotel table by contract. A tourist arriving at such an hotel will be civilly received, but no fatted calf will be killed for him, nor charged for, and the fare and accommodation considered satisfactory by the regular customers of the hotel must be good enough for him or he must go without. Generally speaking these are fair, even in the small towns, the beds being usually clean, if hard and skimpy of pillow; and of the dishes offered, some, at all events, will be found palatable, even to an untravelled Englishman. In any case, it will be useless to ask for others. These remarks are not applicable either to the hotels in Oporto and Lisbon, nor to those which specially depend upon visitors in search of health and pleasure, like those of Bom Jesus, Caldas, and Bussaco. In Oporto the Grand Hotel is said to be the best, but it still leaves much to be desired in many respects. The cuisine, however, 312is good, though there is a tendency to charge unduly high prices for extras, such as wine, table water, &c. The same may be said of the Hotel Central at Lisbon, where the cuisine is excellent and the rooms generally good, but the extras are charged too high. This hotel has been greatly improved of late years, and especially since the reclamation of the foreshore has done away with what formerly was its principal objection. It is very central for all the tramway routes, and for a stay of a day or two may be convenient. The noisy, self-assertive German commercial element is, however, too conspicuous and demonstrative to be agreeable to most English people travelling for pleasure, and personally I much prefer the Hotel Braganza, which stands on high ground overlooking the river, and is quieter than the Central. The Grand Hotel at Bom Jesus, in its way, is excellent, though purely Portuguese, and the proprietor, the son of the late Senhor Gomes, whose enterprise made Bom Jesus what it is, is always anxious to do his best, both here and with his partner at their hotel at Braga, to be useful and agreeable to visitors. The Grand Hotel at Bussaco stands in a class by itself, and I have spoken of it elsewhere.

313Luggage.—As little luggage should be taken as possible, as above 60 lbs. is charged extra on the railways, and a careful traveller will contrive to get what he really needs in packages that may, at a pinch, be carried, or at all events lifted, by himself. For clothing, some warm garments should be worn until Portugal is reached, and again on embarking, but for use in the country summer clothing, with one light over-garment, is all that will be needed. The tyranny of the top hat is almost at an end in Portugal, and this impedimentum may be dispensed with, though it may be advisable for some men-travellers to take with them a dinner jacket-suit, as these are frequently worn on board the larger steamers, and in some of the hotels, such as that at Bussaco.

Language.—Some acquaintance with the Portuguese language is, of course, a great advantage, but the knowledge of such words as are necessary for the purposes of travel may be acquired easily by a few hours of study. Spanish will be generally understood in the hotels, as practically all the hotel servants in Portugal are Spanish Gallegos, though the ability of the latter to reply in Castilian is variable and 314limited. Generally a foreigner speaking Spanish will be understood in Portugal; but a knowledge of Spanish, though enabling him to read Portuguese without difficulty, will not aid him much in understanding it when spoken, as the pronunciation of the two languages is radically different. A little French is also not uncommonly spoken and understood even in the smaller hotels, though very rarely is any English at command. In Lisbon and Oporto, of course, especially the former, English is quite common, and is spoken at all the principal hotels.

Wine.—In all the smaller hotels the wine is served on the table without charge, as in Spain; and as it is, in most cases, the produce of the neighbourhood, it is quite pure and genuine, and in some places excellent. Where it is not liked other wines can always be ordered. Collares, white and red, grown at the foot of the Cintra mountain, is always a safe wine to order, and is very moderate in price, usually about 250 reis per bottle (1s. 1d.). At Lisbon Termo is also a good wine at very reasonable price; whilst in the north of Portugal Bucellas may be recommended, and Mirandella is a good cheap little wine. The new or green wine, 315Vinho Verde, is much liked by the Portuguese in the hot autumn weather, as it is light and slightly acidulous; but it is not much adapted to English tastes. The country wine at Bussaco is excellent—as it is at Cintra, Ourem, and other places. As I have mentioned elsewhere the prices charged in the hotels named in Lisbon and Oporto for ordinary Portuguese wines appear to be excessive in comparison with the price of these wines in other places. The prices of foreign wines are everywhere well-nigh prohibitive.

Water.—The traveller will be wise to regard with suspicion the water in most places, and to insist upon having some of the excellent bottled table waters from the springs which abound in Portugal. One of the best and safest of these waters is Sameiro, drawn from the mountain adjoining Bom Jesus. It is in character almost identical with Apollinaris. Lombadas is another pure neutral water from Madeira, somewhat resembling St. Galmier; whilst Monte Banzão, Pedras Salgadas, and Vidago are digestive waters similar to those of Vichy. The medicinal waters of Luzo, just below Bussaco, are like those of Carlsbad, Kissingen, and Vittel, 316powerfully digestive and rather laxative. It will be unnecessary to order any such waters—unless for purely medicinal purposes—at Bom Jesus, Bussaco, or Cintra, the ordinary drinking water of these places being excellent.

Travelling in Portugal.—The roads are usually very good, and open carriages with one or two horses can be hired in any town at an extremely reasonable price, four or five milreis a day being ample for a carriage and two horses, which for the price will cover some five-and-twenty miles or more according to circumstances. In railway travelling it must be borne in mind that the trains on Portuguese railways for the most part run primarily to convey goods and merchandise, and that passengers must be content to wait whilst the goods are being loaded or discharged. The trains, except an express on the main line, are very slow. The carriages are, however, usually comfortable. The absence of vociferation in Portugal, which in a general way is a boon, is somewhat a drawback in railway travelling, as the names of the stations are not called out, and as they are often painted inconspicuously, and are not visible from the carriage windows, it is necessary for strangers 317to be on the alert in order not to pass their station. The best way is to provide oneself with a railway guide and count the stations as they are passed. There is, however, usually a wait at the stations long enough for inquiries to be made, as things are rarely done in a hurry in Portugal.

ERRATUM

Page 44. From line 2 read as follows: ‘whilst fighting valiantly by the side of the Master of Avis at the ever-memorable battle of Aljubarrota, that gave the regal crown of Portugal to the illegitimate scion of the House of Burgundy.’

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