Pass the day at Belem.--Visit the neighbouring
Monastery.--Habitation of King Emanuel.--A gold Custodium of
exquisite workmanship.--The Church.--Bonfires on the edge of the
Tagus.--Fire-works.--Images of the Holy One of Lisbon.
June 12th, 1787.
We passed the day quite _en famille_ at Belem with a whole legion of
Marialvas. Some reverend fathers, of I know not what community, had sent
them immense messes of soup, very thick, slab, and oily; a portion
which, it seems, the faithful are accustomed to swallow on the eve of
St. Anthony’s festival.
As soon as I decently could, after a collation which was served under an
awning stretched over one of the terraces, I stole out of the circle of
lords, ladies, dwarfs, monks, buffoons, bullies, and almoners, to visit
the neighbouring monastery. I ascended the great stairs, constructed at
the expense of the Infanta Catherine, King Charles the Second’s
dowager, and after walking in the cloisters of Emanuel, looked into the
library, which is far from being in the cleanest or best ordered
condition. The spacious and lofty cloisters present a striking spread of
arches, which, though not in the purest style, attract the eye by their
delicately-carved arabesque ornament, and the warm reddish hue of the
marble. The corridor, into which open an almost endless range of cells,
is full five hundred feet in length. Each window has a commodious
resting-place, where the monks loll at their ease and enjoy the view of
the river.
In a little dark treasury communicating by winding-stairs with that part
of the edifice tradition points out as the habitation of King Emanuel,
when at certain holy seasons he retired within these precincts, I was
shown by candlelight some extremely curious plate, particularly a
custodium, made in the year 1506, of the pure gold of Quiloa. Nothing
can be more beautiful as a specimen of elaborate gothic sculpture, than
this complicated enamelled mass of flying buttresses and fretted
pinnacles, with the twelve Apostles in their niches, under canopies
formed of ten thousand wreaths and ramifications.
From this gloomy recess, I was conducted to the church, one of the
largest in Portugal, vast, solemn, and fantastic, like the interior of
the Temple of Jerusalem, as I have seen it figured in some old German
Bibles. There was little, however, in the altars or monuments worth any
very minute investigation.
It fell dark before I went out at the great porch, and found the wide
space before it beginning to catch a vivid gleam from a line of bonfires
on the edge of the Tagus. I could hardly reach my carriage without being
singed by squibs and crackers, and wished myself out the moment I got
into it, a rocket having shot up just under the noses of my mules and
scared them terribly.
Unless St. Anthony lulls me asleep by a miracle, I must expect no rest
to-night, there is such a whizzing of fireworks, blazing of bonfires and
flourishing of French horns in honour of to-morrow, the five hundred and
fifty-fifth anniversary of that memorable day, when the Holy One of
Lisbon passed by a soft transition to the joys of Paradise. I saw his
image at the door of almost every house and even hovel of this populous
capital, placed on an altar, and decked with a profusion of wax-lights
and flowers.