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. So,

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 more 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, maladies 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 the 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.

“A nobre Guimarães tem por brazão

Ser Corte primeira Portugueza,”

sings 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 of 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. Here 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 Gothic

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 from

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 the 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 reached 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.

[Illustration]

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 in 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

descent, 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 line

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 the 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. A 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 reason 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.

[Illustration: 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 before 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 vision 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.

[Illustration: FROM THE BATTLEMENT, BUSSACO.]

On 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

clothed 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, should 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, and 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 just 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 shadow

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.

[Illustration: THE HOTEL, BUSSACO, FROM THE WOODS.]

At 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 scene 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.

[Illustration: ON THE VIA SACRA, BUSSACO.]

Turning 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 feet, 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.

[Illustration: IN THE GARDENS, BUSSACO.]

A 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 the 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.”

[Illustration: THE PORTA DA SULLA, BUSSACO.]

Early 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 this 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, “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 the 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.

[Illustration: BUSSACO’S IRON RIDGE.]

The 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 meridian 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 magic 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 left.... 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 Carmelite, who in his cell recluse

Was wont to sit, and from a skull receive

Death’s silent lesson, wheresoe’er he walked,

Henceforth may find his teacher. He shall see

The Frenchman’s bones in glen and grove, on rock

And height where’er the wolves and carrion birds

Have strewn them, washed in torrents bare and bleached

By sun and rain, and by the winds of Heaven.”

[Illustration: 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 church 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 young. And

beneath the name this distich ran:—

“A morte me fas deixar

O que me podia danar.”

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 of 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 of

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 the 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.

[Illustration: 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.

[Illustration: 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, with 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 we 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 beyond 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 in 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 in 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 of 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.

[Illustration: 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, like 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 system 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.

Hard 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 attention, 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 the 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 of 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:—

“As filhas do Mondego morte escura,

Longo tempo chorando morarão:

E por memoria eterna em fonte pura

As lagrimas choradas transformarão,

O nome e reputação que inda dura

Dos amores de Ignes que ali pasarão

Vede que fresca fonte rega as flores

Que lagrimas são agua, e o nome amores.”

“The fountain of love in the garden of tears” is the spot called to this

day, and a crumbling little 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, unencumbered 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.

[Illustration: 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

Henry 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 the 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 silent 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, and 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, and 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 escapes

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.

[Illustration: 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 gymnastic

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, the 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.

[Illustration: 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 town 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 main 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.

[Illustration: SOME BEAUTIES OF THOMAR.]

Connected 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

the 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.”

[Illustration: 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. The 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 circle 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 ancient 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 without 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.”

On 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 tell 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 life-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.

More 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.

[Illustration: CHURCH OF ST. JOÃO IN THE PRAÇA, THOMAR.]

Thus, 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,

above 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.

[Illustration: THE BRIDGE AT THOMAR.]

The 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.