Outside in the main street of the town complete quiet reigned in the

fierce sunshine of midday. Against the indigo sky the immense castle on

its peak showed clear, as nothing is ever seen in our mist-laden

atmosphere. A man passes, bearing a great boat-shaped basket piled with

big black grapes, the bloom upon them still undisturbed; four cronies in

black nightcaps and with long staves in their hands gossip in the

parallelogram of black shadow thrown athwart the road by the church

tower; and, by-and-by, three lithe damsels with bright yellow

head-kerchiefs flowing as they walk, swing by joyously; then comes,

painfully hobbling beneath a heavy burden of yellow gourds, a barefooted

old woman, and anon a man riding _à la gineta_, a pacing nag with

brass-embossed harness, and great box stirrups. Then silence again for

another half-hour, and this is life at Ourem.

Still through a land of pine and heather with beautiful little valleys

full of vines, figs, and olives, we drove for two hours more, and, just

as the black shadows began to lengthen, we drove into the town of

Leiria, the Calippo of the Romans, and for long the stronghold whence

the Moors harried the advancing Christians to the north. It is a lovely

place on the banks of the Liz, set in the midst of pine-clad hills, and

the centre of a great agricultural district. Here, again, the two abrupt

eminences that loom over the town are crowned respectively by the

enormous mediæval stronghold and the religious house that for ever seems

to keep it company—the sword and the cross, twin instruments of soldier

and priest, to keep the people in subjection, both alike happily now

superseded, in Portugal at least, by more enlightened means.

[Illustration: IN THE MAIN STREET OF OUREM.]

I started soon after my arrival at the inn, where there was no

particular temptation to remain, to scale the hill from which the castle

frowned down upon the town. The townspeople seemed to care nothing for

the vast ruin that to me was the one attraction of the place. No one

cared to guide me up the steep. It was easy, they said, to find the way

by following the path, and the castle ruins were open to all. So I

started alone, and wound round the lower ascent, finding myself at last

on the side of the hill farthest from the town, and at a point from

which the castle was apparently quite inaccessible, as the ascent was

almost a sheer precipice. A couple of women and some children were in a

field by the wayside, and from them I learnt that I should have taken

another path, and have ascended on the opposite face of the hill. It was

annoying, for the day was already declining, and I had other things to

do on the morrow. Just then an officious urchin of twelve volunteered to

show me a way he knew of by the side I was on, and rather than lose my

opportunity I followed him across a ploughed field to the foot of the

steep.

A rocky path aslant the hill amidst the undergrowth seemed to offer no

great difficulty at first, and I began the climb. The path, if it can so

be called, was continued by other slanting ascents more difficult than

the first, but still intent only upon each next step, I scrambled on by

the aid of tufts of esparto grass, until I became aware that the track

had ended altogether, and that the farther ascent was apparently

impossible. Not until then had I looked down, but when I did so I

understood in a moment the peril in which I was. I stood at a height of

some five hundred feet above the level, and descent by the way I had

come was absolutely impossible. For the last hundred feet I had only

scrambled up by the aid of occasional stones that afforded a momentary

lodgment for the toe and by clutching tufts of grass, but these would

not help me to descend. The pine-needles that lay thick underfoot made

the slope as slippery as ice, and I knew that if I attempted to retrace

my steps I should certainly be dashed to pieces. The poor women below

knew it too; for one was wringing her hands in horror, and had thrown

her apron over her face to hide from her the coming catastrophe, whilst

the other was loudly bewailing, whilst she belaboured the head of the

urchin who had been the cause of the trouble. For one moment panic

seized me, but it was succeeded immediately by a cool wave of critical,

speculative interest, as if another person’s life and not mine were at

stake, as to the sporting chance of my ever being able to negotiate the

hundred feet of sheer precipice that lay between me and the top. Each

step achieved was a triumph, and my whole soul was concentrated upon the

chances of the next being successful. Of course, the ascent had to be

made by long zigzags on the face of the precipice, and again and again,

as a stone slipped from beneath my foot or a frond of bracken yielded to

my grasp, I gave myself up for lost. But I never glanced below, and the

jagged and frowning battlements above me gradually drew nearer and

nearer, until at last, I know not how, I stood beneath them, panting but

safe, and then, looking from the giddy height to the field below, I saw

quite a large group of peasants now, waving their black nightcaps, and

shouting in token of rejoicing at my safety.

The great castle around me, built by King Diniz the Farmer, in the

thirteenth century, upon the site of the Moorish stronghold, was of

immense extent, and included ruins of residential edifices of later

mediæval times. As I saw it now it was a dream of beauty. The setting

sun falling athwart its lichen-covered stones dyed them as red as blood.

Within the vast crenellated walls two distinct castles stood, one the

cyclopean early structure, and the other a lovely Gothic palace, whose

ogival windows, pointed arches, and slender pillars were still graceful

in decay. The dismantled chapel is exquisite, and if light had served or

any intelligent guidance had been obtainable, the inscriptions in it

would have been interesting. But the twilight was falling, and the

magnificent view from the battlements over the town, the plain, and the

mountains called to me.

[Illustration: THE CASTLE, LEIRIA.]

It was a feast of loveliness to the eye. The golden light of the setting

sun glorified the vast plain below me, with its silver river fringed by

poplars winding through it for many a mile, and the hills in the

distance clothed to the crests with lofty pines, black and solemn now in

the fading light. On a hill adjoining that upon which I stood the great

white Convent and Sanctuary of the Incarnation looks across at the

crumbling castle that it has outlived; and, just below me, between the

inner and outer defences of the stronghold, on a green grassy slope,

some children are playing joyously. As I wander down the way, safe and

easy on this side, through mighty donjons, and thick, tunnelled walls

which have seen so many bloody sights and echoed so many dismal sounds,

the very spirit of peace seems to pervade the place. Half-way down,

leaning over one of the grim walls, was a beautiful peasant girl talking

to her young lover, who stood at the foot, and cascading masses of

purple flowers fell across the jagged stones here and there, giving the

just touch of colour needed to perfect the scene. Past a quaint old

desecrated church and the enormous monastery of St. Peter, now, like

most of such places, a barrack, I tread the picturesque praça of the

town again, and stroll along the fine avenue of planes and eucalyptus by

the side of the river as the after-glow lights up the cliff and the

castle with a pearly reflected glamour. The hill from below is like that

of Edinburgh, but apparently double as high, and the vast extent of the

battlements is more evident than when seen on the summit. Huge

buttresses of rock seem to sustain the curtain that connects the keep of

the fortress with the Gothic palace, and everywhere the grey of the

granite is covered with a patina of yellow lichen, and the crevices

filled with yew, aloes, and olives.

[Illustration: ON THE ALAMEDA, LEIRIA.]

The next day was market-day at Leiria, and long before dawn the town was

busy. This was by far the largest country market I saw in Portugal, and

the gathering of peasantry the quaintest and most picturesque. The

shops, particularly those in the mosaic-paved praça, are mainly

wholesale warehouses for the supply of village traders, and a very

extensive distributing trade must be done. The town itself, on this

occasion, was one vast emporium, and multitudes of people bargained from

early morning till past midday in the acacia avenues under the brilliant

dark-blue sky. A gay-looking crowd they were: for the costume here is

quite distinct. The women invariably wear a velvet pork-pie hat over a

yellow or red head-kerchief, of which the ends hang down the back, and

the older women have full black cloaks with hoods, whilst most of them

have a broad band, some nine inches wide, of yellow cloth round the

bottom of the skirt. The wares exposed for sale were infinite. In the

praça great heaps of maize, grapes, potatoes, chestnuts, and beans

covered the mosaic pavement, whilst stalls displayed calicoes and cloths

of vivid colours. Giant yellow gourds in high piles lined the footpath,

and elsewhere under the shade of the trees stacks of grass-fodder and

maize-leaves for cattle stood. In another space heaps of salt, and long

lines of stalls for the sale of salted sardines and salted pork, were

followed by a score of temporary butchers’ shops. Then came stands for

the sale of fresh fish, skate, sardines, and cod, with the inevitable

bacalhau; and farther on, spread upon the ground, were hundreds of

homely crocks, red amphoræ, slender and beautiful in shape, coarse

household dishes gaudily decorated, and unglazed jars to keep water

cool. Beneath a beautiful picturesque arcade of ancient arches in the

praça women were seated before panniers piled with pears, figs, apples,

melons, and grapes, such as Covent Garden might glory in; and hard by

strings of garlic, onions, and eschalot claimed their purchasers. In a

field by the side of the river long lines of oxen, horses, and asses

were for sale, and men in red and green nightcaps, and trousers made of

two or three different coloured cloths, soberly bargained for the

beasts. Over all was the dark-blue arch of the sky, and the brilliant

sun, tempered beneath the trees by the light-green of the acacia leaves:

but what strikes most an observer who is familiar with the south, is the

absence of vociferation and apparent excitement. There was no shouting,

no pushing or quarrelling, and every transaction in the chaffering town

seemed to be got through with serious deliberation. Even the cluster of

gaily-dressed women around the stately sixteenth-century fountain

adjoining the hotel, gossiped staidly, and the children playing beneath

the trees were as grave as little judges. This is Leiria as I saw it on

market-day; but long before sunset the country people trudged homeward

again; the ox-wains carried away the produce and merchandise; the stalls

and booths folded their canvas sides and disappeared, and the next

morning Leiria resumed its habitual sleep, from which it awakens but

once a week.

[Illustration: THE ENCARNAÇÃO, LEIRIA.]

-----

Footnote 1:

I noted with interest that this castle of Ourem, and others of these

vast hill-top strongholds, had the outer defences arranged similarly

to those I have described in the chapter on the buried city of

Citania; namely, that on the side of the hill, where attack was

difficult or impracticable, the outer walls dipped far down the slope,

whilst at the point where danger might be apprehended the three lines

of circumvallation were comparatively close together. This arrangement

of hill-top defences was evidently long pre-Roman in the Peninsula,

and seems to have been adopted by the Romans and their Gothic

successors.

VI

BATALHA AND ALCOBAÇA

I drove out of Leiria in the morning just as the business of the market

was in full swing; and for the first half-hour of the upward way amidst

a country of vines and olives, we met crowds of country people riding

into the town on heavily laden asses. Then, mounting high above the

plain, we passed into the region of pines and heather, where the warm

but invigorating air came charged with the scent of thyme, lavender, and

rosemary. At a point of the road, about eight miles from Leiria, a deep

hollow opens to the left, and at the bottom of it, and reached by a

downhill road running almost parallel with the way we came, lies the

world-famed abbey of Batalha, the wonder and envy of ecclesiastical

architects for six centuries, and even now, dismantled and bedevilled as

it is, one of the most beautiful Gothic structures in existence.

Before its west front I stand lost in admiration. The whole edifice is

built of a marble-like limestone, which time has turned to a beautiful

soft yellowish cream colour, similar to that of an old Japanese ivory

carving. Like most Portuguese cathedrals the body of the church is

somewhat narrow; but in this case a large chapel on the north side

extends the apparent width of the exterior west front. How can one hope

to convey in written words an adequate impression of this exquisite

façade? To the severe perpendicular parallel lines over the door and

window, reminiscent of the west front of Lincoln, is added a lace-like

elaboration of parapets, pinnacles, and glorious flying buttresses,

which almost bewilders by its aerial gaiety and transparent richness. A

beautiful Gothic breastrail stands before a double flight of steps

leading down to the west door, for the abbey is lower even than the road

before it; “the portal,” wrote William Beckford, a hundred and twenty

years ago, “full fifty feet in height, surmounted by a window of

perforated marble of nearly the same lofty dimensions, deep as a cavern,

and enriched with canopies and imagery in a style that would have done

honour to William of Wykeham, some of whose disciples or co-disciples in

the train of the founder’s consort, Philippa of Lancaster, had probably

designed it.”

To me this door presented itself rather more in detail. I saw a portal

the whole width of the nave-space, the deep, bevilled sides being

occupied by the Twelve Apostles standing under rich Gothic canopies, and

from the capitals above them a slightly pointed arch sprang ending in a

floreated cross finial, the arch itself being composed of six orders,

each occupied by a row of Kings of the House of David under exquisite

Gothic canopies. The great window above is full of tracery so intricate

and plastic in appearance as almost to banish the impression of a work

in stone. The octagonal lantern of the side chapel is supported by

flying buttresses of indescribable grace and lightness, and is fronted

by a screen pierced with three Gothic windows almost level with the main

west front; and upon every point of the building and along each side of

the roof of the nave crocketed pinnacles rise, supported by fairy flying

buttresses—the effect of the whole exterior from the west front being an

exquisite blending of seriousness and exuberant rejoicing.

And these were precisely the feelings that prompted the establishment

here of the Dominican abbey at the instance of its English foundress,

Philippa of Lancaster, daughter of John of Gaunt, married in 1386 John,

the Master of Avis, the high-minded and patriotic bastard of the royal

house, who had successfully resisted Spanish aggression the year before,

and, with the assistance of the English archers at Aljubarrota, had

gained for himself the crown of Portugal. Here in the neighbourhood of

the battle, at the instance of Philippa, was built this abbey of

Dominican monks in devotional thankfulness for the signal victory, and

for the rescue of the King from threatened death. All through the older

portion of the building the English Plantagenet influence is

predominant, and marks the abbey as being entirely different from all

other ecclesiastical buildings in Portugal.

The monastery was always a poorly endowed one, in glaring contrast to

the neighbouring Cistercian house of Alcobaça, one of the richest

monastic houses in the world. Beckford, in his humorous description of

his visit to both houses in 1782, draws a lively comparison between the

two. Accompanied by two great Portuguese prelates, of whom he makes

merciless fun, he had gone to see Alcobaça at the wish of the Prince

Regent. His great train of servants and attendants had been received

with lavish splendour and Gargantuan gluttony at Alcobaça, and on the

way with the prelate of the latter house to visit Batalha, the whole

party had got drunk at Aljubarrota, whose wine is famous. They arrived

at Batalha at night.

“Whilst our sumpter mules were unloading, and ham and pies and

sausages were rolling out of plethoric hampers, I thought these poor

monks looked on rather enviously. My more fortunate companions—no

wretched cadets of the mortification family these, but the true

elder sons of fat mother church—could hardly conceal their sneers of

conscious superiority. A contrast so strongly marked amused me not a

little.... The Batalha prior and his assistants looked quite

astounded when they saw the gauze-curtained bed and the Grand

Prior’s fringed pillow, and the Prior of St. Vincent’s superb

coverlid, and basins and ewers and other utensils of glittering

silver being carried in. Poor souls! they hardly knew what to do or

say or be at—one running to the right, another to the left—one

tucking up his flowing garments to run faster, and another rebuking

him for such a deviation from monastic decorum.”

I have in my library a manuscript account by Lord Strathmore of the

visit he paid to the two monasteries twenty years before Beckford, and

his account of the poverty of Batalha in comparison with Alcobaça is

more emphatic still. He says:—

“Though far from rich, they received us with great hospitality. The

prior, an exceedingly good, kind, old man, exerted his utmost

efforts to do us honour, and had a cook sent to him from the Bishop

of Leria upon ye occasion. We here with many thanks dismist our

militia, who had been mounting guard hitherto at ye door of our

apartment. This convent is of ye most elaborate and exquisite Gothic

architecture I ever saw, one part being left imperfect, being so

beautiful that nobody dar’d to finish it. When we took leave of our

old prior next morning ye only request he made us was that we would

relate to ye minister how much their fabric had suffered by the

earthquake [_i.e._ of 1755], and how much they needed ye King’s

assistance to repair it: whereas I could not help observing that

every one of our friends who had been particularly assiduous about

us at Alcobaça desired us to remember their names particularly at

Lisbon.”

Alas! priors and monks, rich and poor, have all gone now, and the place

is a “national monument,” with hardly a pretence of being a place of

worship.

The interior of the church is almost severe in its plainness, the lofty

narrow nave being divided by clustered pillars arranged in a somewhat

peculiar manner; the three pillars facing the nave supporting the groins

of the main roof, whilst from the remaining three spring the groining of

the aisle. Before the high altar, and close to the steps, are two

magnificent tombs side by side, the recumbent figures upon them hand in

hand; the male in full armour, the woman clasping a book. “_Hic Jacet

Eduardus I., Port. et Alg., Rex et Regina, Elenora Uxor Ejus_,” runs the

inscription around the fillet; and this is the tomb of the unhappy

Duarte, son of John the Great and Philippa of Lancaster, who died of a

broken heart, whilst still young, at the disaster to his arms and house

in the defeat of his crusading attack upon Tangier.

As Beckford saw the church during service it must have throbbed with the

life and colour that it now lacks.

“There is greater plainness [_i.e._ than Winchester], less

panelling, and fewer intersections in the vaulted roof: but the

utmost richness of hue, at this time of day at least, was not

wanting. No tapestry however rich, no painting however vivid, could

equal the gorgeousness of the tint, the splendour of the golden and

ruby light which streamed forth from the long series of stained

glass windows: it played, flickering about in all directions on

pavement and on roof, casting over every object myriads of glowing

mellow shadows, ever in undulating motion, like the reflection of

branches swayed to and fro in the breeze. We all partook of these

gorgeous tints, the white monastic garments of my conductors seemed

as it were embroidered with the brightest flowers of paradise, and

our whole procession kept advancing invested with celestial

colours.”

Iconoclasm and war have wrought their fell work upon Batalha since then;

but still the lovely fane stands materially uninjured. The

transept-chapels and sacristy are fine, especially the latter, though

the seventeenth-century carved woodwork matches ill with the exquisite

pure Gothic groining of the roof, and the great yellow sarcophagus of

Diego Lopez de Souza, master of the Order of Christ, in the adjoining

chapel of St. Barbara, is a remarkable piece of sixteenth-century work.

One of the great glories of Batalha is the side chapel already

mentioned, the octagonal “chapel of the Founder.” The arrangement of it

and its general effect are strikingly like those of Queen Victoria’s

mausoleum at Frogmore. In the centre, standing high and imposing in all

the pomp of Gothic tracery, are the twin tombs of John the Great and his

English wife, their sculptured effigies hand in hand as the noble pair

went through life; and around the chapel are ranged the sarcophagi of

their sons Pedro, João, Fernando (who chivalrously passed all the best

years of his life a hostage to the Moor), and, the greatest of them all,

the Prince Dom Henrique the Navigator, who made Portugal a world power.

Upon each stone coffin are carved the insignia of the Garter and the

arms of England quartered with those of Portugal, and along the fillets

run the quaint mottoes that each royal personage adopted for his device.

Some of them are enigmatical; such as that which consists of the

repetition of the word “_Désir_” alternating with the scale of justice,

and the other that offers the riddle of “VII.,” a cogwheel, and

“_Jamais_” repeated again and again. “Pro rege pro grege,” on the other

hand, if hackneyed, is still quite intelligible.

“All these princes,” says Beckford, “in whom the high bearing of

their intrepid father and the exemplary virtues and strong sense of

their mother were united, repose after their toil and suffering in

this secluded chapel, which, indeed, looks a place of rest and holy

quietude; the light equally diffused, forms, as it were, a tranquil

atmosphere, such as might be imagined worthy to surround the

predestined to happiness in a future world. I withdrew from the

contemplation of these tombs with reluctance, every object in the

chapel that contains them being so pure in taste, so harmonious in

colour, every armorial device, every mottoed label, so tersely and

correctly sculptured.... The Plantagenet cast of the whole chamber

conveyed to me a feeling so interesting, so congenial, that I could

hardly persuade myself to move away.”

Every word written by Beckford a hundred and twenty years ago of this

chapel is true to-day, and I could have lingered for hours before the

coffins of these heroic princes and their parents in a day-dream of

recollection prompted by their noble lives and deeds.

Just outside the door of the chapel, in the pavement of the nave, is a

stone bearing the almost effaced inscription that below it lies the body

of “Martin Gonsalves de Maçada, who saved the life of the King Dom John

in the battle of Aljubarrota”; and one speculates that had it not been

for the fortunate deed of this obscure gentleman, this great abbey would

never have been built, and the kings and princes that lie in it would

never have existed, with the exception of the Master of Avis himself,

who would have passed down to history not as the founder of a dynasty

but as an unsuccessful rebel.

A door in the south aisle leads into the renowned cloister, and here,

the work being of a later date than the church, controversy has spent

itself as to whether the luxuriant exuberance of the sculpture is, or is

not, in perfect taste. Personally I find the cloister exquisite beyond

description, and I care not whether the purists condemn it or not. The

sensation produced, it is true, is—like all Manueline sculpture—neither

purely devotional nor highly exalted, but rather one of joyous delight

in the actual handiwork, in the gracious curves, in the kaleidoscopic

variety, in the dexterous adaptation of means to ends, and these

sensations, though I am told that they are vulgar when produced by

ecclesiastical sculpture, I experience in the fullest measure as I gaze

at this marvel of human skill, the cloistered court of Batalha. Standing

in the centre of the courtyard and looking up at the abbey, one sees

three beautiful lace-like parapets rise one above the other along the

whole length, on cloister, clerestory, and nave, clear-cut edges of

perfect curves against the blue sky. Each of the cloister arches is

filled with stone tracery of amazing richness and variety, the cross of

the Order of Christ and the armillary sphere being deftly introduced in

the fretwork with great effect. This cloister, like that of Belem, of

which I shall speak later, seems to mark the purer and less extravagant

development of the Manueline style, in which the Gothic traditions have

not been entirely cast aside, and only the most callous soul could

remain unmoved by its exquisite beauty. From the cloister there opens a

chapter-house of the same style and period, a perfect gem, although the

entrance arch leading to it shows signs, in the lace-like pendent

ornament that lines it, of the over-elaboration which finally led to

decadence. The chapter-house is thus described by Beckford with special

reference to what struck me most—namely, the exquisite groining,

springing like palm branches from clustered pillars in the wall, and all

centring in the apex of the roof:—“It is,” he said, “a square of seventy

feet, and the most strikingly beautiful apartment I ever beheld. The

graceful arching of the roof, unsupported by console or column, is

unequalled; it seems suspended by magic, indeed human means failed twice

in constructing this bold unembarrassed space. Perseverance and the

animating encouragement of the sovereign founder at length conquered

every difficulty, and the work remains to this hour secure and perfect.”

Close by is the great refectory of the monks, now used as a sort of

lumber-room museum of débris; and leading from it the vast, vaulted

kitchen, its stone roof blackened still by the smoke of centuries of

cooking fires. The humble little ancient cloister of the original

monastery still remains, with its rows of cells in the upper ambulatory.

Here there is no Manueline exuberance or wealth, only reverent pointed

Gothic, grave groined roofs and arches unadorned, enclosing, as of old,

the sweet, quiet little garden that more than a century ago aroused the

admiration of Beckford.

[Illustration: THE CLOISTERS, BATALHA.]

From there the distance is but a few steps to the “unfinished chapels”;

but the contrast of feeling between the two places is wide indeed. The

chapels consist of a sort of Lady chapel or apse built out at the back

of the high altar, like Henry VII.’s chapel at Westminster. A large

central chapel with ten smaller chapels round it rise to perhaps half

their intended height, and roofless, for when King Manuel died in 1521

the work was stopped and has never been resumed. The first view of this

fragment, and particularly of the great arch by which it was intended to

connect it with the church, strikes an observer with astonishment that

human brains and hands could ever compass such intricacy of design and

execution. Convolutions more tortuous than those of Arab art, floridness

more overloaded than Churriguerra ever dreamt of, boldness for which the

only just word is insolence, here run riot unrestrained, fatiguing the

eye, tiring the mind, and ending by palling upon the senses from mere

over-exuberance. The lower portion and pillars, and the exterior of the

chapels, are restrained and sober, and this makes the more overwhelming

the arches and the upper pillars designed to support the roof. One feels

that the design is that of a genius, but of a genius whom another step

would have led to madness, and who threw aside all the accepted canons

of his art. But, withal, though Beckford avoids detailed notice of these

chapels, it is impossible even for the purist in architecture to pass

such work by without some admiration being mixed with his surprise. The

great arch leading into the church is the culminating point of the work;

its western side being a mass of intertwined foliage, knots, cables,

flowers, and concentric lines, cut in high relief in seven distinct

mouldings or orders, and the inner line of the arch is decorated with a

deep pendent open-work border; whilst forming part of the intricate

design of the whole arch, the enigmatical words “_Tanias el Rey_” are

repeated hundreds of times on small labels. What the words mean nobody

knows, though the most probable guess is that they may be an anagram for

“_Arte e Linyas_” (“art and lines,” in old Portuguese).

[Illustration: “THE UNFINISHED CHAPELS,” BATALHA]

As I walked up the road leading from the hollow in which the abbey

stands, I looked back again and again at the perfect loveliness of the

building I was leaving behind. The flying buttresses, the lines upon

lines of fretwork edging, the multitude of floreated pinnacles, and the

glorious Gothic of the west front, all of the softened hue of old gold,

presented in my eyes the perfection of a Gothic building. I have seen

the stately grandeur of Amiens, the soaring pride of Cologne, the vast

magnificence of Burgos, and the fairy prettiness of Milan, and I have

worshipped at the shrines of Ely, Norwich, and Lincoln. Each one in its

way is supreme and incomparable; but Batalha, reservedly nestling in its

green hollow far from the busy haunts of men, has a charm of its own

that I have found in no other Gothic church; and as I finally turned my

back upon it, I carried with me a memory which in my life will never

fade.

We are soon amongst the pines and heather again, driving along an

elevated ridge with a valley and bold mountain ranges beyond upon either

side, the effect of the distant hills seen through the perpendicular

lines formed by the straight pine trunks that cluster on each side being

very beautiful. A sort of light-blue veil seems to cover the far

landscape, such an atmosphere as Corot loved to paint; not a mist

arising from dampness, but the azure tint of the air itself seen by its

clarity to a vast distance through the dark pine copses.

The first sign of systematic begging that I had experienced in Portugal

was at Batalha; groups of children, encouraged apparently by the

constant visitors to a show place, making a regular business of cadging:

for we were getting now into the centre of Portugal where the people are

less sturdy and the position of the peasant less prosperous than in the

north. Along the road from Batalha to Alcobaça, a new and really

charming form of begging was resorted to by the children on the

wayside—chubby, well-fed mites they looked most of them, evidently not

in abject want. They kneel on the roadside in an attitude of prayer,

their hands joined in supplication, their eyes closed reverently and

their expression rapt, like little dirty angels. They have before them a

few cut flowers, and the moment the carriage passes them they start like

a flash of lightning from their devotions, and throw the flowers into

the stranger’s lap, whilst they begin to trot by the side of the vehicle

in a dogged, persistent way, not articulately asking for alms, but

simply trying to win a penny by reproachful glances and disregard of all

entreaties to them to stop their dog-trot and go away. Needless to say,

such tactics are usually successful, for only a very hard heart could

withhold the small coin they covet, when an angelic-looking child of

seven has panted half a mile barefooted by the side of a carriage going

at a brisk pace.

Half-way to Alcobaça the ridge upon which the road runs narrows to a

mere knife edge, and on the left hand a wide valley sweeps down

suddenly, a bold long hill rising beyond. This is the battlefield of

Aljubarrota, upon which John, the Master of Avis, won his crown, and for

the second time asserted the independence of Portugal from Castile on

the 14th August 1385. From Thomar he had brought all the power that

patriotic Portugal could raise, and upon this ridge awaited the attack

of the Castilians, who, if once they could pass it, would have all the

seacoast of Portugal at their mercy down almost to the mouth of the

Tagus. The position is not very dissimilar from that of Bussaco, but

upon a smaller scale. The Portuguese right and left flanks were both

defended by projecting spurs; upon one of which the English bowmen were

posted, and by standing upon the centre of the position it is easy to

see, even to-day, how skilfully John the Great had chosen his ground for

the decisive struggle, and how difficult it was for the Castilians to

succeed. They dared not proceed along the valley leaving this strong

force of enemies upon the heights behind them, able to cut them off from

their base, and harass them flank and rear; whilst to swarm up these

precipitous slopes in the face of a semicircle of determined opponents,

and enfiladed by archers on both flanks, seemed inviting defeat. All was

against the Spaniards. A mysterious epidemic was prostrating them, the

King of Castile was ill, and had to be carried to the battle in a

litter, and, above all, the Portuguese were struggling for the

independence of their country, whilst the Spaniards were fighting at the

behest of a corrupt and unpopular king. So on that fateful morning in

August, five hundred and twenty-three years ago, as the chivalry of

Castile struggled up these broken slopes, the men upon the ridge from

which I look down now over the smiling plain, stood like a steel wall,

and with mace and battle-axe, and double-handed swords, clove and smote

them, whilst the cloth-yard arrows pierced and bowled them over by

hundreds ere they reached the summit. The hearts of the Spaniards failed

them, and down the slope they fled, delivered now to carnage and to

capture. Ten thousand of them, the best fighting men in Castile, fell,

the king barely escaped by flight, whilst half his court were taken.

Aljubarrota was won, the house of Avis fixed upon the throne for two

hundred years, and the alliance between England and Portugal cemented so

strongly as to have lasted unbroken to this day.

Through the poverty-stricken looking village of Aljubarrota, where some

questionable relics of the battle are exhibited for a consideration

(though no one offers me wine, as they did to Beckford’s princely

cavalcade), a few miles more brings me to a point, whence looking down

on the right side of the ridge the town of Alcobaça is seen below,

surrounded by miles of vineyards, touched now with bronze and crimson,

for the vintage is nearly over, and a big hummock of a building over

all, that I know is the famous Cistercian monastery, the sepulchre of so

many princes of the ancient royal house of Portugal that I have

travelled thus far to see.

The church and monastery stand fronting a very extensive triangular

praça, crossed by long avenues of acacias, and the first sight of the

edifice is distinctly disappointing. An ordinary façade in the

seventeenth-century, Spanish “Jesuit” style of the time of Philip IV.,

with white walls and yellow stone outlines, and flanked on both sides by

monastery buildings of great extent in the same taste, or want of it,

did not quite fulfil the hopes which Beckford’s description of the

splendours of Alcobaça had aroused. It is true that the west door of the

church somewhat redeemed it, for it was evidently the remains of the

original front in pure unadorned Gothic. The whole edifice is raised

above the surface of the praça upon a platform some ten feet high, and

upon this parade the monks in old time were mustered to receive

distinguished visitors. Beckford thus describes the reception of his own

party—

[Illustration: ON THE PRAÇA AT ALCOBAÇA.]

“The first sight of this regal monastery is very imposing, and the

picturesque well-wooded and well-watered village out of the quiet

bosom of which it seems to rise relieves the mind from the sense of

oppression the huge domineering bulk of the conventual buildings

inspire. We had no sooner hove in sight, and we loomed large, than a

most tremendous ring of bells of extraordinary power announced our

speedy arrival. A broad hint from the Secretary of State

recommending these magnificent monks to receive the Grand Prior and

his companions with peculiar graciousness, the whole community,

including fathers, friars and subordinates, at least four hundred

strong, were drawn up in grand spiritual array on the vast platform

before the monastery to bid us welcome. At their head the Abbot

himself, in his costume of High Almoner of Portugal, advanced to

give us a cordial embrace.”

All is quiet enough now, for the monks are gone these seventy years, and

the huge dilapidated edifice behind, forming a vast square, is partly

occupied as a barrack, and the rest falling into ramshackle ruin. Nor is

anything stirring in the prim little town, which has grown up around the

wealthy foundation, and now lives placidly upon the produce of its

vineyards.

The interior of the church presents a marked contrast to the façade. The

impression produced is one of ponderous solidity and permanence, and the

stern devotional character of all the ecclesiastical buildings founded

by the great Affonso Henriques, first king of Portugal, in the twelfth

century is again conspicuous, though even here a cornice of gilt curly

wood lines the fine chancel arch. The nave though somewhat narrow is

impressive and handsome, separated from the aisles by square pillars of

immense size, broader than the spaces between them. From brackets or

ledges at various heights from the ground upon the front and sides of

these pillars spring the simple arches and groining of the roof, each

pillar carrying its arch right over the nave, so that each set of simple

groins is separated from the rest by the arch moulding. The aisles, very

narrow, seem overwhelmed by the immense square pillars, and it is easy

to understand in the face of this stern interior that the notoriously

luxurious and self-indulgent monks of Alcobaça did their best to soften

the austerity of their surroundings. That they did so to some purpose is

seen both by Beckford’s account of his visit and by my Strathmore

manuscript of 1760. The account given by Lord Strathmore is worth

transcribing:—

“The minister having ... ordered them to do us ye utmost honour they

were capable of, we found a large place before the convent so

crowded with people that it was necessary for a guard of militia

which they had summoned to make a lane for us up ye steps. At ye

door we were reciev’d in form by ye guardian and first people of ye

fraternity with ye utmost ceremony, and conducted by ye light of

torches thro’ cloisters of Gothic arcades with ye whole college in

procession to our apartments.... Our rooms were extremely spacious,

and were hung with crimson damask and gold, ye floor cover’d with

Persian carpets, and our beds in alcoves deck’d with embroidered

coverlids. We had a basin and ewer brought to wash before supper,

and on another salver a napkin of fine linen, curiously pinck’t and

strew’d with rose-leaves and orange-flowers. We then pas’t into the

next room, where we found a large table groaning under a service of

monstrous dishes.”

The writer comments unfavourably upon all the eatables placed before

him, reeking, as they did, he says, of garlic, bad oil, and other

horrors, and he comments upon the tasteless lavishness of the fare. He

then continues:—

“At last, after having drank reciprocally all ye healths that we

thought would be required on either side, we retir’d to repose. The

next morning we were no sooner dres’t than we found ye whole college

assembled in ye next room at our levee. We breakfasted in state, at

ye end of a long table with ye rest seated round ye room, and

admiring ye peculiar grace with which we put every morsel into our

mouths. After breakfast we were attended thro’ ye convent, and had

everything explain’d to us, which I must own gave me great pleasure.

They are of ye Cistercian order, and ye richest in Portugal,

possessing a vast tract of land which is said to bring them in

£50,000 per annum. Their magnificence is in every way

proportionable. Their church is Gothic, but extremely noble, ye

plate, jewels and ornaments, copes, etc. are as rich as possible....

They have no taste or design in their expenditure, and seem to study

richness rather than elegance in all they do. As they reign, so they

entertain, like princes over the district. In the evening we saw

their great altar lighted up at vespers, which at the end of a long

Gothic aisle had a most striking effect with ye organ and voices

altogether impressing upon the mind most solemn awe.”

Remains of the tasteless splendour referred to are still to be seen on

all sides. The gilt-trimmed chancel arch, the high altar, with its blue

starred globe and wooden gilt rays in the centre, and popes carved and

gilt in niches each side, amidst gold whirligigs galore, are as

incongruous as can be with the stern, simple nave: and the altars of the

north transept and retro choir all present the same features, some of

them, moreover, being in a lamentable state of dilapidation, inciting to

derision rather than devotion. In the north transept, hard by the

thirteenth-century sepulchral stones of Affonso II. and Affonso III., is

a dark but beautiful Gothic hall, the holy of holies of the monastery,

“the chapel of the tombs,” the resting-place of several of the earlier

princes of the royal house.

[Illustration: UNDER THE ACACIAS, ALCOBAÇA.]

The most striking objects in it are two magnificent sarcophagi in florid

decorated Gothic. The recumbent figures of king and queen upon them, as

fair and perfect as the day they were sculptured, rest, not hand in hand

as upon most similar tombs, but foot to foot. For these are the

sepulchres of Pedro the Just and his murdered mistress, Ines de Castro,

done to death by servile nobles beside the “fountain of love” in the

“garden of tears” at Coimbra, and the faithful king ordered the body of

himself and his beloved to be laid thus, so that when the universal

trump should call him to arise, the first object upon which his reopened

eyes should rest would be her, who, though unwed, was yet his wife

through all eternity.

Kings, queens, and princes, whose names now mean little even in the

country where they held sway and nothing elsewhere, lie around in tombs

of varying magnificence, together with débris and relics of times

earlier than any of them. The usual dense ignorance is displayed by the

guardian of the objects he is supposed to describe; for he points out

two very small ancient sarcophagi, one of them obviously Byzantine

Romanesque, and the other probably pre-Christian, and tells you gravely

that they once contained the bodies of Ines de Castro’s children. Both

of them are centuries earlier than her time, and her only children grew

up and survived her. But this is not more absurd than the

representation, in the current English “History of Portugal,” of a lady

in the height of the Portuguese fashion of the end of the seventeenth

century as Ines de Castro, who lived in the fourteenth.

The cloister of the monastery presents the characteristics of two

styles. The lower part is pure early Gothic, like the church and

chapter-house, with simple rose lights in each arch; but the upper

storey has evidently been added or rebuilt in the early sixteenth

century in good Manueline taste; and in one corner there is a very

beautiful fountain in the same style bearing the monogram of the

“Fortunate” monarch Manuel himself. The vast refectory, of which

Beckford spoke so sneeringly, as dirty and slovenly, is entered by a

handsome Manueline doorway, and is now being restored. The entrance to

the sacristy is also a fine specimen of Manueline, but inside the bad

taste of the late seventeenth-century monks is rampant. All around the

great square apartment are carved and gilt niches, in which are dozens

of life-sized busts also carved and gilt, of saints and bishop, each of

which has a hollow for a relic upon the breast, all now despoiled of

their contents; and the precious treasury of jewels, ornaments, and

embroidery that aroused the envious admiration of the virtuoso Beckford,

has all disappeared, many of the most beautiful and precious objects

being now in the Museum of Fine Arts at Lisbon, a storehouse of mediæval

goldsmith’s work unsurpassed in Europe, though almost completely

neglected both by residents and visitors to the capital.

One more show chamber there is in the “national monument” portion of

Alcobaça: a hall lined with eighteenth-century pictorial blue tiles,

representing in large tableaux memorable deeds of the kings of Portugal,

with statues of the kings themselves upon brackets above; the great

tableau at the end, representing the coronation of Affonso Henriques,

being an exceptionally good specimen of a poor artistic medium. As I

walk through the grave, silent church again, and so out into the bright

praça, with its avenues of shady acacias casting long shadows, the

façade of the church strikes me as more inharmonious than before, now

that the wonderful glow of the slanting sunrays touch the salient points

with fire. The front with its seventeenth-century figures, its Manueline

central round window, and its elaboration of outlines, so characteristic

of the Spanish “Jesuit” style, are utterly incongruous with the pure

early Gothic of the doorway, and it is with a sigh of regret that one

turns from the contemplation of such a result of wealth divorced from

artistry.

The vast monastic building behind the church is squalid and ugly, for

the occupation of soldiery does not tend to the æsthetic maintenance of

a building. The famous kitchen of the monastery is used now for military

purposes, but may be seen by easily obtained permission. As I looked

upon it, a bare, great, vaulted hall, with the channel for water still

running through it, and the marks of the long line of ovens extending

across the wall, I cast my thoughts back at the busy scene that the

place presented in the palmy days of the monks, when the flesh-pots of

Alcobaça were proverbial through the land. This is how the place struck

Beckford on his memorable visit.

“The three prelates lead the way to, I verily believe, the most

distinguished temple of gluttony in all Europe. What Glastonbury may

have been in its palmy state I cannot answer, but my eyes never

beheld in any modern convent of France, Italy, or Germany, such an

enormous space dedicated to culinary purposes. Through the centre of

the immense and nobly groined hall, not less than sixty feet in

diameter, ran a brisk rivulet of the clearest water, flowing through

pierced wooden reservoirs, containing every sort and size of the

finest river fish. On one side loads of game and venison were heaped

up, on the other vegetables and fruit in endless variety. Beyond a

long line of stoves extended a row of ovens, and close to them

hillocks of wheaten flour whiter than snow, rocks of sugar, jars of

the purest oil, and pastry in vast abundance, which a numerous tribe

of lay brothers and their attendants were rolling and puffing up

into a hundred different shapes, singing all the while as blithely

as larks in a cornfield.”

Abbots and monks, lay brothers, and cooks have gone the way of all

flesh; and of the plethoric plenty of old no vestige remains in the

enormous dingy hall. So, there being no fatted calf killed for me in

these degenerate days, I wend my way through the acacia avenues to the

humble hostelry where a dinner is prepared for me, eatable, it is true,

but a sad falling off from the culinary splendours of Alcobaça in the

good old times.

Then in the gloaming I drove four miles through woods of pine and

eucalyptus, balsamic now in the soft evening air, to Vallado station on

the railway to Lisbon. Out of the darkness at about seven there sprang a

long spinning factory blazing with electric light, and humming with the

whirr of wheels. The “hands” were just flocking out from their daily

toil, and filled the black, unlit road with a gay babbling crowd. There

was no town near, and the mill was deeply embosomed in the pine woods:

this seemed to me an ideal form of factory life, in which the house of

toil, instead of debouching its crowd of pallid workers into fetid

town-slums to fester unwholesomely until the morrow, needed but a step

from its threshold to plunge them into the sweet air of the pines and

heather; and where the “hands,” though they worked in crowds underneath

a roof, never ceased to be country folk. It was but a passing flash and

hubbub to me in the darkness of my lonely drive, and the toilers to me,

and I to them, but fleeting shadows. But seen thus, there seemed to me

something of suggestive possibilities in this hive of what is usually an

urban industry, set in the midst of lofty pines, sweet mountain herbs,

and far-flung folds of purple heather. A railway journey of

three-quarters of an hour brought me to the famous medicinal thermal

watering-place of Caldas da Rainha, where in the excellent Hotel

Lisbonense, which the proprietor, one of those frugal, honest, Gallegos

who are the industrial salt of the Peninsula, told me was the largest in

Portugal, as it is certainly one of the best, I ended a long day of

overcrowded impressions by a night of delightful dreamless sleep.

VII

CINTRA

I had often before seen Caldas in the height of the bathing season, when

the midsummer heat made Lisbon intolerable and inspired people with more

or less imaginary maladies to get cured. The place then, with its crowds

of visitors and pleasant parties, was bright and lively enough; but now

that the last pleasure-seeker had fled, and the only people taking the

wonderful health-giving waters were the few really sick, and the inmates

of the great “Queen’s hospital” adjoining the hot springs, Caldas looked

mean and ugly. The drives through the pine forests in the neighbourhood,

it is true, are pleasant; but for a fortnight I had been passing through

a glorious pine country much more diversified and elevated than these,

and Caldas had no fresh attractions to offer me. A visit to the famous

factory of enamelled _faience_, charmingly situated in the midst of

gardens, yielded an hour’s interest in the inspection of the late

Bordallo Pinheiro’s fine sacred figure groups now in course of

production for the shrines at Bussaco, and the hundred curious

Palissy-like pieces in high relief, plates of fruit, fish, &c., which

are the specialty of the factory. But that being finished the charms of

Caldas were exhausted, so far as I was concerned, and the train for

Cintra claimed me irresistibly.

The first station from Caldas (Obidos), with its little town, nestles at

the foot of an eminence upon which another of the stupendous mediæval

castles peculiar to Portugal rears its massive battlements, castles in

comparison with which most of the English feudal strongholds are mere

sentry-boxes. For these Portuguese fortresses were national outposts

thrust forward successively into conquered or debatable land; bases for

further extension southward and bulwarks against the return of the tide

of Islam. Another two hours of travelling brought us into a country of

red rolling hills, with a bold granite ridge on the east and a still

loftier ridge beyond merging into the blue mist on the horizon. For

miles on either side grand sweeps of flowering heather flushed against

breaks and slides of ochre-earth, touched here and there with the light

feathery green of the pines; whilst in the dips of hills sheltered

valleys of bronzing vines and little white granges, slept tranquilly

after the bustle of the just finished vintage. Soon we get nearer the

granite hills before us, and looming over the station, upon a great

projecting spur of one of these there frowns another of these tremendous

strongholds, from which, running towards the east and south between us

and Lisbon, there bars the way a series of gigantic ridges and peaks.

Most of the heights are capped by towers, and scored along the faces of

the mountains may still be discerned lines and marks of earthworks and

redoubts. These are the never-to-be-forgotten lines of Torres Vedras, by

which the genius of Wellington finally held the legions of Napoleon at

bay, and saved Portugal—and incidentally Europe—from the domination of

the French.

All the earth seems soaked and saturated in sunlight and brilliant

colour; little ancient towns, like Runa, perched on the tops of cliffs,

at the foot of which more modern hamlets cluster, testify to the changed

conditions between the days when the first need was safety from

aggression, and the later times when, the danger of wanton attacking

being past, men sought accessibility and ease. Acacias, aloes, canes,

olives, and vines spreading down the plain, tell of a benign and equable

climate enjoyed in security and peace; a beautiful and favoured land,

where nature has done its best to make man happy without making him

idle. As the twilight begins to fall we change trains at Cacem, the

junction of the small local line from Lisbon to Cintra, and

thenceforward we travel due west towards the sea. Before us looms a

great isolated mountain, the “Rock of Lisbon,” which seafarers know so

well, with its bold outline and its gleaming towers on the topmost crag.

“And Cintra’s mountain greets them on the way.”

—_Childe Harold_, canto i.

The “mountain of the moon,” and of its goddess Cynthia, devoted from the

dawn of time to the worship of deities that, one by one, have been

deposed, this long-backed hummock, stretching nearly fifteen miles from

end to end and rising well-nigh two thousand feet above the plain, is

one of Europe’s acknowledged beauty spots, and, like a human

professional beauty, on this occasion coyly hid its charms from too

ready a discovery by cloaking its summit with a cloud as black as ink,

forerunner of the coming night. The gradient of the line continues

upward as we wind round the base of the hill, and it is quite dark when

the terminal station of Cintra is reached, and after a long drive upward

the quaint little English hostelry, known to four generations of

Britons, welcomes me to dinner and to rest.

Like the similar mountain of Bussaco, the “Rock of Lisbon” is scored by

ravines and dells innumerable, sheltered valleys open to the soft

sea-breezes charged with grateful moisture; and from time immemorial the

luxuriance and variety of its vegetation have been proverbial. At a time

when Lisbon, only some fifteen miles away, is sweltering and breathless

within its south facing semicircle of hills, the slopes of the mountain

of Cintra are fresh and invigorating, and some of its gardens are a

veritable paradise all the year round. But beautiful as it undoubtedly

is, Cintra owes much of its fame to its nearness and accessibility to

the capital, and so far as English celebrity is concerned, to the

accident of several influential Englishmen persistently singing its

praises at a time when Lisbon was a fashionable winter and health

resort.

The village of Cintra lies in one of the folds of the great hill, at

perhaps a third of its height up the side: a little Swiss-looking

pleasure-town round an open praça, like a set scene upon a stage. A few

hotels and shops, a church, the inevitable big stone building at the

most conspicuous corner, with the heavily barred windows on the level of

the footpath, and the squalid prisoners begging and bandying repartee

with the passers-by: at one end of the praça, a lovely ancient Manueline

cross upon a palm-shaded mound, at the base of which a picturesque group

is usually lounging, and close by, the courtyard of an old, old palace

whose most conspicuous features are two curious protruberances from the

roof, looking like a cross between Kentish oast-houses, and giant

champagne bottles. This is Cintra as seen from its central point, but

over it all there towers that which gives unique distinction to its

otherwise somewhat trite, self-conscious picturesqueness. Sheer aloft

upon a precipice a thousand feet and more above its roofs there stretch

the mighty battlements and massive keeps of a huge castle of

fawn-coloured stone, a castle so immense as to dwarf Thomar, Leiria, and

even Obidos almost to insignificance. Long lines of crenellated walls

following the dips and sinuosities of the crest of the peak appear to

grow out of the mighty rounded boulders; some of these great masses of

rock seeming to hang over perilously—as they must have done for

thousands of years—top-heavy and threatening.

[Illustration: THE OLD PALACE, CINTRA.]

To climb such an eminence looks impracticable when seen from the praça

of the little town, and yet it is but a pleasant and easy walk up the

zigzag road round the projecting shoulder of the hill. As I start in the

early morning to ascend the two twin peaks, only one of which is visible

from the praça, the air is indescribably sweet with the mingled

freshness of the sea and the perfume of herbs and flowers. The way winds

upwards between the trim walls of villas embosomed in gardens.

Ampelopsis, blood-red now, long trails of wistaria and starry clematis,

and large fuchsia trees loaded with flower, hang over the pathway

everywhere, whilst masses of heliotrope clothe the jutting gables and

corners, and pervading all are the scent and sight of oceans of flowers.

Palms, planes, poplars, and firs shoot upward, and around their straight

bare trunks there clusters a tangle of figs, laurels, mimosa, camellias,

aloes, and cactus. On the outer side of the road, as the villas are left

behind, you may look over the dwarf-wall down the tree-clad slopes into

glens of deep shade, with here and there a glimpse through the branches

of a vast sunlight plain far below, whilst on the inner side of the

zigzag way, the mosses and ferns, and the pendent greenery of the

precipitous hillside, with an occasional break into a deep ravine,

exhibit at each turn and step some new beauty of tint or atmosphere.

Presently at a turn of the road, after half-an-hour’s climb, you see

right over head the bare granite cliff covered with huge overhanging

boulders, and on the summit a long stretch of yellow battlements and a

huddle of enormous towers. The trees around us are mostly oaks now, and

the grey boulders are covered on their inner faces with ivy and lichens,

whilst clumps of purple crocuses star the grass by the wayside. The sun

is as hot as July in England, but the breeze is delightfully fresh and

pure, the sky of spotless azure, and the air so clear that the ancient

fortress, still far above us, is seen in all its detail as if we had it

near to us under a giant microscope.

Suddenly as I turned a corner there burst upon my view another and a

loftier peak than the one upon which stands the Moorish stronghold that

had hitherto been my objective. A crag so inaccessible it looked, as to

suggest that the imposing building upon it with its lofty towers was the

work of a magician. The royal palace of the Penha is this, piled up

rather than built upon a sheer precipice.[2] Here upon the highest point

of the rock of Lisbon was King Manuel the Fortunate wont to linger for

hours and days for many months together, climbing up from his palace in

the town below, that he might gaze far out upon the Atlantic, watching

and praying for the return of Vasco da Gama from his voyage to India

round the African continent, the route that in two generations the

impetus of Prince Henry the Navigator had opened up. There was but a

tiny Jeronomite hermitage or penitentiary here in this savage eyrie to

shelter the anxious king,[3] and during his vigils he vowed that if the

great explorer came home successful he would build upon the spot a

worthy monastery of the Order in memory of the event. The work must have

been a prodigious one, for even now the place is hardly accessible by

carriages, and the quantity and the weight of material necessarily

brought from below was enormous. This monastery like the rest, was

disestablished and secularised by the State in 1834, and King Ferdinand,

the consort of the Queen of Portugal, and a first cousin of Queen

Victoria and Prince Albert, bought the building for conversion into a

royal palace, as it remains to-day, and here he lived the latter years

of his life with his second wife, the ex-opera-dancer, the Countess of

Edla. Ferdinand altered his palace, in many cases with very doubtful

taste, Moorish and German baronial features being liberally grafted on

to the Manueline edifice, with the result that the whole building when

seen closely is a pretentious muddle, saved from contempt by some of its

ancient portions, and by its sublime situation.

The palace on the peak was soon lost to sight again on my climb upward,

and the path led direct to the outer donjon of the Moorish stronghold

opening upon a narrow path cut along the face of the rock, and bordered

on the outer side by a low stone wall. The view down over the steep,

rocky slope, with the town of Cintra far below, and the plain limitless

beyond, is very fine, and the walls that border the path are clothed

with mosses and ferns almost as lovely as those of Bussaco. The fortress

must have been impregnable by force; and indeed was only gained at last

from the Moors by treason, this very gate having been bought by the

Christians from an unfaithful guardian. This narrow path cut on the face

of the precipice is the only practicable approach to the fortress, and

leads soon to yet another gate flanked by a strong tower built upon one

vast, solid boulder. The dells below are filled with billows of verdure;

the face of the rock on the inner side of the path is covered with

creepers, ferns, and flowers, whilst above them, high up in the dips

near the summit, great trees lean over, shading the way by which we

come. Yet another strong gate tower we pass through; and with a sudden

turn we are inside the fortress, on the right of us a ruined chapel,

once a mosque, and on the left a watch-tower, with, at its foot, a

monument upon which the cross is graven surmounting the crescent,

emblematical of the fate of the adjoining chapel.

To describe in detail this prodigious ruin would be impossible in any

reasonable space. The summit of the crag consists of two separate peaks

at some distance from each other, the higher one occupied by the main

keep, “the royal tower,” and long battlemented walls reach from one

point to the other, with bastions at intervals and massive square keeps

at the salient angles. On all sides within the great enclosure formed by

the battlements, covering the whole summit, remains of towers and

buildings of various sorts are scattered, amidst the dense growth of

trees and brushwood that have intruded upon the space. The battlements,

many of them built upon the rounded boulders that border the precipice

and following the contour of the hill top, are strong and perfect still;

and it needs but little imagination to people them again with the

turbaned and mailed warriors, sheltered snugly behind them, watching for

the advancing hosts of the Christian king, certain that, so long as

Islam was true to itself, no force could take this stronghold of their

race. The view over the battlements on all sides is tremendous. Just

below the walls a Titanic scatter of boulders, varying in size from a

few feet in diameter to the bulk of a cathedral, and then the descending

folds of greenery, with the sunlit plains and clustering towns below;

and there on the west, seemingly almost at the foot, a long stretch of

breaker-strewn beach, and the blue line of the sea. The view on the

Cintra side is almost appalling, the drop from the battlements and

boulders to the town being almost sheer, and on the south-east a great

bay opens, and the mouth of the Tagus bounds the prospect.

As I gazed, entranced at this wonderful scene, surrounded by yet sturdy

relics of the war of civilisations eight centuries old; musing upon the

immutability of nature’s face in comparison with even the most enduring

works of man, I noticed a wire fixed on the face of the Moorish

battlement, and thence to a boulder, and so from point to point, I know

not whither—to the palace or the adjoining peak, perhaps. A telegraph

wire! A familiar object enough, but, as it seemed to me, strangely out

of harmony with the stern battlements from which for centuries the sons

of the prophet held back the advance of Western civilisation.

The point upon which the Moorish stronghold stands is connected with the

higher site of the palace by a saddle-back dipping considerably and then

rising very precipitously. The vegetation on all sides is marvellously

luxuriant, and inside the well-kept gardens of the royal domain flowers

and plants, temperate and sub-tropical, make the place a horticultural

paradise. Through graceful Moorish archways, bright with Alambresque

decorations and _azulejos_, under rocky tunnels and over mediæval

drawbridges, all redolent of the gimcrack taste of the forties, the

upward way leads at length to the little inner _patio_ of the castle,

and here, at last, some of the Manueline monastery still remains. It is

little enough, a window here and a door there, and is almost swamped by

modern Alambresque and German baronial additions, but the ancient chapel

in the _patio_ is a gem. The beautiful groined ceiling especially

attracts attention, but the pride of the place is the exquisite altar of

translucent alabaster or jasper and black marble in the purest style of

the classical Renaissance, dated 1532, a thank-offering of King John

III. for the birth of an heir. The many groups of figures in alabaster

are extremely beautiful, and as the whole structure turns upon a pivot

the perfection of the work can be seen in various lights. A concession

to the Portuguese Manueline taste of the time is made by the pendent

festoons on each side of the altar, which are formed of two lengths of

knotted and twisted cable in alabaster, a _tour de force_ of execution,

though rigid purists may perhaps question their artistic

appropriateness.

The chapel is marred by the hard, bright German stained glass inserted

in the principal window by King Ferdinand; but the modern Portuguese is

very far from being critical in matters of art, and though hundreds of

people yearly toil up the mountain to venerate the holy image of the

Virgin of the Penha in this chapel, and the lovely ivory figure of St.

John in the sacristy, no one apparently thinks of removing the flashing

offence of the stained glass window in favour of some subdued medium

more appropriate to this beautiful little church. A climb to the highest

tower of the palace is said to be rewarded by a magnificent view. I was

content to take it on trust, for I had already climbed high enough, and

could hardly hope to behold a more striking prospect than those I had

enjoyed from the castle battlements, and from the inner _patio_ of the

palace itself, which is perhaps the most striking of them all.

As I retrace my steps down the long zigzags to Cintra again, and ever

and anon look up at the heights from which I have come, they seem quite

inaccessible. Equally, or more so, does the somewhat lower, but even

more precipitous eminence called the Cruz Alta, from which the prospect

is of surpassing extent over land and sea.

“Eis campinas que ao ceo seu canto elevam,

Aqui o espaço, alem a immensidade,”

“Behold the plains their psalms raise to the sea,

Here spread below in space, beyond immensity,”

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

Everywhere the flowers trail over the walls of villas, and the high

palms within rock softly in the heliotrope scented breeze. Very

beautiful it is; but the gardens belong to other people, and are

jealously closed by stone walls and iron gates. From above them, at

hundreds of points all over Cintra, you may command views of gardens of

tropical luxuriance; but without permission of the wealthy owners you

may not enter them. Cintra’s beauty is not free like the sacred wood of

Bussaco, where you may wander at your will through purely sylvan scenery

that not even Cintra can surpass. The grandeur of the towering Moorish

stronghold on its crest of grey boulders is more imposing than anything

Bussaco can show, and the interior of some of the highly cultivated

private gardens of Cintra are as fine as any in Europe; but, so far as

the enjoyment of the mere traveller is concerned, I am inclined to agree

with the opinion of those who hold that Cintra’s fame is quite equal to

its merits. Beckford had very much to do with it. His friends the

Marialvas were amongst the first of the Portuguese aristocracy, and owed

the large palace of Seteaes, where Byron and some guide-books

erroneously say that the humiliating convention of Cintra was signed by

the victorious English generals. Beckford’s visits to them and to the

court at Cintra inspired him with an enthusiastic admiration for the

place, and his letters are full of references to its beauty. To the

immensely wealthy and eccentric young Englishman desires and their

accomplishment ever went hand in hand, and Beckford purchased a

picturesque valley and slopes of the mountain some two miles from the

town round the shoulder of the hill towards the west. Here he built an

eccentric house, partly in the Moorish style, and here he displayed the

virtuoso tastes and exotic luxury which afterwards made Fonthill

famous.[4]

All that money and skill could do was lavished upon the gardens in the

ravines and slopes of Monserrate; and long before Beckford died the

place became famous throughout Europe. Sir Francis Cook, Viscount de

Monserrate, to whom Monserrate belonged for many years, greatly extended

and improved the property, and his son, Sir Frederick Cook, the present

owner, has followed the same course of munificent maintenance of this

earthly paradise; with the result that now the beauties of the glens at

Monserrate are probably unequalled in their own way. It was the middle

of October when I visited the gardens on this occasion, although I had

seen it in all the glory of its spring and summer splendour on other

visits, and the luxuriance of the vegetation showed as yet no signs of

waning. Great magnolias, daturas, and bougainvilliers were in full

flower, with roses, clematis, brilliant coleas, and immense quantities

of heliotrope. Tree ferns, aloes, agaves, and palms grew with a freedom

in the open air that not even the hot-houses of Kew could surpass,

whilst the crimson ampelopsis and golden-leaved maples presented

gorgeous masses of colour. Some of the sylvan views are perfectly

charming; but after all, one feels that one is simply an interloper

seeing the showplace on sufferance by payment of a shilling—which the

owner gives to a charity—and a sylvan scene, perhaps less lovely, but in

which I could roam at will, as at Bussaco, would have had greater

attraction for me.

Upon a peak opposite Monserrate, and belonging to the same owner,

stands a humble little monastery that once belonged to the

Franciscan-Capuchins. It is a quaint and curious place, the cloister,

a tiny one, being joined to a rock, out of which the cells are

excavated. These and the doors and ceilings of the cloister are lined

with cork bark for warmth and cosiness in this exposed position, and

for centuries the hermit-monks lived and prayed on this peak

overlooking almost as great a panorama as the Jeronomites on the high

crest of the Penha. Franciscans and Jeronomites are alike gone now;

but in this case at least the place has been saved from desecration,

and the little chapel is maintained with reverent care by Sir

Frederick Cook, to whom the place belongs. Byron and Southey, too, did

much for the fame of Cintra. In a room at Lawrence’s Hotel, commanding

a fine view of plain and sea, the former wrote a portion of “Childe

Harold,” and his references in verse to the beauty of the place are

numerous. Writing of the cork convent, Byron refers thus to Honorius,

a rigid ascetic who in a cave there lived long years in self-imposed

penance:—

“Deep in yon cave Honorius long did dwell,

In hope to merit heaven by making earth a hell.”

Volumes of poetry, indeed, have been in the aggregate written about

Cintra. Byron made it practically his first stage of “Childe Harold’s

Pilgrimage,” and went in raptures over it:—

“Lo, Cintra’s glorious Eden intervenes

In variegated maze of mount and glen.

Ah, me! what hand can pencil guide or pen

To follow half on which the eye dilates,

Through views more dazzling unto mortal ken

Than those whereof such things the bard relates

Who to the awe-struck world unlocked Elysium’s gates—

The horrid crags by toppling convent crown’d,

The cork-trees hoar that clothe the shaggy steep,

The mountain moss by scorching skies embrown’d,

The sunken glen whose sunless shrubs must weep,

The tender azure of the unruffled deep,

The orange tints that gild the greenest bough,

The torrents that from cliff to valley leap,

The vine on high, the willow branch below,

Mixed in one mighty scene with varied beauty glow.”

The poet, in one of his letters to his mother complaining of the dirt

and discomfort of Lisbon, says: “To make amends for the filthiness of

Lisbon and its still filthier inhabitants, the village of Cintra, about

fifteen miles from the capital, is perhaps in every respect the most

delightful in Europe. It contains beauties of every description, natural

and artificial; palaces and gardens rising in the midst of rocks,

cataracts, and precipices; convents on stupendous heights; a distant

view of the sea and the Tagus.... It unites in itself all the wildness

of the Western Highlands with the verdure of the south of France.”

Robert Southey, too, calls Cintra “the most blessed spot in the

habitable globe,” and Beckford’s letters are crowded with eloquent

passages to the same effect. “The scenery,” he says, “is truly Elysian,

and exactly such as poets assign for the resort of happy spirits.... The

mossy fragments of rock, grotesque pollards and rustic bridges you meet

with at every step, recall Savoy and Switzerland to the imagination; but

the exotic cast of the vegetation, the vivid green of the citron, the

golden fruitage of the orange, the blossoming myrtle, and the rich

fragrance of the turf, embroidered with the brightest coloured and most

aromatic flowers, allow me, without a violent stretch of fancy, to

believe myself in the garden of the Hesperides.”

The Portuguese poets have of course dwelt much upon the beauties of

Cintra, especially Almeida Garrett, the principal Portuguese poet of

modern times. One stanza by him is cut upon a slab erected on one of his

favourite walks in the village as a memorial, and the following lines

from it may be quoted:—

“Cintra, amena estancia,

Throno da vegetante primavera:

Quem te não ama, quem em teu regaço

Uma hora da vida lhe ha corrido,

Essa hora esquecerá?”

“Ah! Cintra, blest abode,

The throne of budding spring,

Who loves thee not: and who

Can e’er forget in life

An hour passed in thy lap?”

When the stronghold on the crest of the mountain was securely held by

the Moslem soldiery, before the great Affonso Henriques swept southward

with the Cross victorious, the Moorish kings of Lisbon lived in silken

ease below in their summer alcazar in the praça of Cintra—a building

this full of interest still, though injudicious or inexperienced

travellers have caused no little disappointment by comparing it

unjustifiably with the splendid Arab remains at Seville, Granada, and

Toledo. Truth to say, the palace at Cintra is no Alhambra, and should

not be approached with expectations of anything of the sort. And yet the

place is very quaint and charming as you enter the courtyard from the

praça, hard by the Manueline cross with its spiral shaft. The front of

the palace appears to be purely Manueline, the elaborate window and door

decoration, consisting of twisted cables and intertwined branches, and

even the pillars, spouts, and gargoyles are all redolent of Portugal’s

age of heroic expansion and wealth under the “Fortunate” king.

It was a regal Christian palace long before his time; for his

great-grandfather, John the Great and his wife Philippa of Lancaster,

had adapted the Moorish alcazar for their summer residence and made it

their favourite palace, their grandson and successor Affonso being born

here. But it was in the palmy times of Dom Manuel that the palace of

Cintra became the centre of culture, wit, and poetry, where gaily-clad

courtiers listened to the wondrous tales of Portuguese explorers

returned from Africa and the Indies, and poets sang the national epics

telling of the opening of the mystic East with its wealth untold to

Portuguese commerce and dominion.

Though the outside of the palace is Portuguese Manueline, the interior

exhibits at every step portions of the original Moorish edifice

unaltered. The vast kitchen, with its enormous champagne-bottle chimneys

in the centre, has never ceased to be available for culinary uses from

the time of the Arab kings until to-day; whilst the dining-room is pure

Moorish, lined with beautiful Arab tiles. Arab tiles, indeed, remain in

many rooms, and the chancel of the chapel, once of course a mosque, is

exquisitely paved with them. There is a beautiful little Moorish _patio_

too, with its marble fountain and laurels, that might be a portion of a

palace at Fez or Mequinez now, so pure and intact is it. The older rooms

of the palace generally are dark, for the Moorish architects shut out

the sun wherever possible, and the up and down floors on all sorts of

queer levels impress upon one the immense antiquity of the place as a

dwelling-house.

The finest rooms are the hall of magpies, the hall of swans, and the

hall of stags. The first-named is a square apartment with beautiful

Moorish tiles, and a coved ceiling covered with paintings of magpies,

each one with a motto issuing from its mouth saying, _Por Bem_, “with

good intent.” The legend told is that Queen Philippa one day surprised

John the Great, who was a gallant lover, kissing a maid of honour and

offering her a rose. The Plantagenet queen had a temper of her own,

which John probably feared more than the Castilian charge up the slope

of Aljubarrota, and the king in exculpation cried to his wife, “Por

Bem”; as who should say, _Honi soit qui mal y pense_. The reputation of

John was such that his excuse passed from mouth to mouth derisively, the

queen’s sycophantic maids repeating it with such significant emphasis,

and so frequently, that the king to shame them adopted “Por Bem” as his

motto, and had his reception hall at Cintra painted with the chattering

birds repeating it.

[Illustration: MANUELINE WINDOWS IN THE OLD PALACE, CINTRA]

Another fine Moorish hall is called the hall of swans, of which the

ceiling is painted with those birds, in memory of a pair of them kept in

the _patio_ below, and given to King Manuel by his brother-in-law,

Charles V., as a very great rarity. Another large apartment, with a

conical roof, was constructed by King Manuel himself, who gave to it the

name of the hall of stags. Here the king collected the armorial

achievements of all the Portuguese nobility. Seventy-four stags are

ranged around the room, each one having dependent from its neck the

scutcheon of a noble family—except one, that of Tavora, which the great

minister Pombal, in the eighteenth century, ordered to be erased—whilst

upon a frieze running round the hall is the following verse:—

“Pois com esforços e leaes

Servicios, foram ganhados,

Com estes e outros taes

Devem ser conservados.”

“By prowess stout and loyal fame

These honours bright were gained;

By others like or eke the same

They needs must be retained.”

The small and plain hall of audience or justice has at the end a seat of

tiled brick upon which the Sovereigns sat, and here tradition says the

Council met, summoned by the rash young King Sebastian in 1578, to

sanction the crusading attack upon Morocco upon which he had set his

heart. All his fiery zeal and imperiousness were needed to persuade his

nobles to agree to an adventure from which many foresaw disaster. But

the ambitious youth had his way, and his mysterious fate, never solved

when he disappeared for ever from the eyes of men at the battle of

Alcacer Kebir, ended the male line of the house of Avis which John I.

had begun at Aljubarrota two hundred years before. In this gloomy

chamber the die was cast, and with the loss of Sebastian his uncle

Philip II. and his descendants became kings of Portugal for a century.

A more modern tragedy was enacted within these ancient walls. The

vicious young debauchee, Affonso VI., was deprived of his crown and his

wife by his brother Dom Pedro, in 1667; and here in the palace, in a

room called after him, the wretched king passed the last twelve years of

his imprisonment, shut off entirely from the sight of men. The windows

of his prison-chamber still show the sockets wherein the strong bars

were set, and a deep groove worn in the brick floor along one side marks

the spot where the footsteps of the caged king, as he paced up and down

for years before his bars, have worn his enduring epitaph. Up in a

little closely barred cell overlooking the choir of the chapel, where

Affonso used to hear mass, he died suddenly in 1683.

The old palace of Cintra, indeed, is full of memories, a place to linger

in and about, rather than to rush through at the tail of a guide;

although it must be confessed that the guardian in this case does take

an intelligent interest in the objects under his care. Cintra, in short,

is beautiful beyond compare in certain directions; but, as happens in

most frequented show-places, the chief beauties can only be enjoyed by

the permission of others, and by the use of a silver key. The beautiful

villa-gardens are jealously shut in by high walls and forbidden by gates

marked private; the palace of the Penha, a royal residence, is

approached with bated breath and whispering humbleness, and the palace

in the town, though not now inhabited by royalty, is still only shown on

special application. But there is one thing in Cintra that may be

enjoyed freely and uncontrolled by all, the finest thing that Cintra can

show, the view from the town of that stupendous Moorish fortress on its

precipitous height. In sylvan beauty, in sweetness and freshness of

atmosphere, even in its sublime prospects of mountain, vale, and sea,

Bussaco may rival and, in some respects, surpass it; but the

long-stretched yellow battlements and massive towers piled upon the

eternal granite boulders, sheer up a thousand feet and more over the

little pleasure-town and its leafy ravines, would be worth the voyage to

Portugal alone to see, even though the gardens of the rich were more

reserved and exclusive than they are.

-----

Footnote 2:

Byron thus speaks of this climb up the hill of Cintra:—

“Then slowly climb the many winding way,

And frequent turn to linger as you go,

From loftier rocks new loveliness survey,

And rest ye at Our Lady’s house of woe.”

This last epithet for the monastery, which is now the royal palace, is

an error arising from a misunderstanding, which Byron shares with many

other people to the present day. The original name of the venerated

image of the Virgin, after which the monastery was named, is “Nossa

Senhora da Penha,” “Our Lady of the Rock.” For some reason the place

is still often referred to as the “Pena,” which means “sorrow,” and

the Saint becomes “Our Lady of Woe,” as Byron called it.

Footnote 3:

Two German ecclesiastics, who in 1450 were sent to Lisbon by the

Emperor Frederick III. to ask for the hand of the Portuguese Infanta

Leonor, thus mention Cintra in the narrative of their voyage: “Oh!

Cintra, most pleasant place and royal garden, with a little river in

which there are good trout. Here, too, there are devout brethren in a

Jeronomite monastery, who live according to their rule.”—_Historia

Desponsationis Frederici III. cum Eleanora Lusitanica._

Footnote 4:

When Byron visited Cintra in 1809, Beckford, whose fame as an author

rests upon his curious Eastern tale of “Vathek,” had left his villa at

Monserrate for the more pretentious splendours of Fonthill, and the

Peninsular war was pending.

“And yonder towers the Prince’s palace fair;

There thou, too, Vathek, England’s wealthiest son,

Once formed thy paradise, as not aware,

When wanton wealth her mightiest deeds hath done,

Meek peace voluptuous lures was ever wont to shun.

Here didst thou dwell, here schemes of pleasure plan,

Beneath yon mountain’s ever beauteous brow;

But now, as if a thing unblest by man,

Thy fairy dwelling is as lone as thou.”

VIII

LISBON

No capital city in Europe, with the exception of Constantinople, can

compare with Lisbon in beauty of situation. On approaching the city up

the Tagus from the sea the panorama presented is most striking; although

the unæsthetic Portuguese have done their best to mar it by fringing the

foreshore with possibly profitable, but certainly hideous and offensive,

industrial and commercial excrescences, from the noble and historic

tower of Belem at the mouth of the river, almost hidden in the midst of

defiling gasometers, to where the city merges into the country at Poço

do Bispo three miles away. Piled up upon a grand amphitheatre of hills,

the city rises tier over tier, the river opening out before it in the

form of an extensive bay. Away above Belem the vast square Ajuda palace

stands conspicuously upon a hill-top backed afar off by the huge mass of

Cintra; whilst at the other end of the panorama towards the east the

ancient citadel-palace of St. Jorge looks down from its height upon the

busy river-bank and the central valley running inland, in which the

rectangular main streets are cramped.[5]

The noble Praça do Comercio, Black Horse Square, as English visitors

call it, fronts the river in the foreground, the most imposing public

square in Europe, with the exception perhaps of the Place de la Concorde

in Paris. Previous to the great earthquake of 1755 a royal palace stood

upon a portion of this site, and the valley behind it was a closely

crowded congeries of narrow and filthy lanes. In my manuscript already

referred to of Lord Strathmore’s travels in the country, an interesting

account is given of the condition of things in 1760, when he saw the

ruined city; and a quotation from his description of the plans then

existing for rebuilding the portion destroyed will give a good idea of

the present aspect, since the plans were executed precisely.

“The prospect,” writes Lord Strathmore, “of this great city rising

from its ruins is still distant, as besides ye arsenal there are but

three houses built upon the intended plan. The plan of the streets

and squares is extremely well imagin’d. There is a pretty broad

valley between two hills, running down to ye Tagus in ye part where

ye palace stood. Thro’ this they intend to make their principal

street, all ye houses regularly built after one model and _tirés au

cordon_, terminating in a noble square open in front to ye river,

which is of great breadth here, with old Lisbon upon high ground

opposite. The other three sides [of the square] will be surrounded

by a very handsome, narrow arcade, with public buildings above and

an equestrian statue of ye King in ye centre. The other streets will

likewise be regular, and will lead at right angles into ye great

street from ye hills on each side. Tho’ ye design is extremely noble

ye architecture is as bad [_i.e._ as before] except in ye square

already described. They seem to consider ye front of a house only as

a high wall with holes larger or smaller to admit light as occasion

requires.”

This exactly pictures Lisbon as it stands to-day. From Black Horse

Square on the Tagus bank run the Rua Augusta and two other parallel

streets, called respectively the streets of “gold” and “silver,”

straight as a line to the busy centre of Lisbon, the fine parallelogram,

called the Praça de Dom Pedro, or the Rocio, paved with its inevitable

mosaic of black and white waves, at the end of which is the theatre of

Donna Maria, the central railway station, and the entrance to the

handsome Avenida da Libertade, a garden and tree-shaded drive of good

houses occupying the whole of the narrow valley for nearly two miles

into the suburbs. On either side of the Avenida and the principal

rectangular streets in the valley the hills rise precipitously, and when

the tops of these have been surmounted a series of sudden dips and rapid

ascents succeed east and west. The city is, therefore, a most fatiguing

one to explore, as to go anywhere away from the river-bank, which with

the exception of Black Horse Square is irretrievably ugly and squalid,

and from the streets “_tirés au cordon_” in the central valley,

formidable hills have to be faced. This of late years has been much

relieved by a complete system of electric trams, which practically cover

the city, and by the instalment of funicular railways and lifts up some

of the more difficult ascents.

The city, on the whole, is decidedly disappointing at close quarters.

The straight principal streets and rectangular cross thoroughfares, with

their flat, prosaic architecture, the high white houses all alike, are

the antipodes of picturesqueness, whilst the authorities seem perversely

to have done their utmost to make the river-side as ugly as Rotherhithe

or Wapping. This is the more to be regretted, as since I first knew the

city many years ago, great tracts of land have been reclaimed from the

sludge and ooze of the foreshore which might well have been treated with

some regard for public amenity. The large strip reclaimed from the

river, however, almost as far as Belem, has for the most part been

turned into untidy deserts of dust, shabby-looking docks, and

dumping-places for débris. The utter lack of æsthetic taste is

observable on all hands. The terrace before the king’s residence, the

palace of the Necesidades, for instance, is upon the brow of a low hill,

and commands a splendid view of the river and the opposite shore for

many miles on either hand; and yet even here, between the palace and the

river factory chimneys belch black smoke day and night, hopelessly ugly

industrial buildings block the prospect, and the reclaimed foreshore and

docks are as desolate as elsewhere.

Of the pure picturesque, indeed, little remains in Lisbon; but what

still exists must be sought amongst the fisher folk on the river-side,

and especially in the markets that have been built on the reclaimed land

of the Ribeira Nova, not far from the centre of the city and close to

the Hotel Central. It was pleasant to turn into the cool, spacious,

covered fish-market out of the brilliant sunlight, which even quite

early in the day drove people to welcome shade. The air was clear,

crisp, and elastic, and every object seemed to sparkle with light and

colour. Inside the market hundreds of people were bargaining quietly,

for even here the absence of vociferation was remarkable; servants

buying their stocks of provisions for the day, housewives of the humbler

class doing their own marketing, baskets on their arms, and women fish

hawkers by the score laying in their stocks. They were all shoeless, as

usual, wearing under their vast head burden black pork-pie hats over red

or yellow kerchiefs, and they have girdles below the hips into which the

upper portion of their pleated skirts is drawn to relieve the waist of

their weight. Upon the ground, spread around the women sellers, were

great heaps of glistening fish; cod, dory, skate, whiting, and large

quantities of squids or cuttlefish, which are much liked by the

Portuguese poor.

[Illustration: ON THE QUAY, LISBON.]

The male fish-sellers of Lisbon are for a wonder even more picturesque

than the women; for here on the Tagus the seafarers of the south are

first noticeable, quite distinct in racial characteristics as they are

from those of the north. These Lisbon fishermen go barefooted, which the

poorest men of the north never do, they wear breeches only to the knee,

girt by a crimson sash, and the hanging tasselled bag-cap falls and

waves over their shoulder as they loup along with a peculiar springing

gait under a long flexible pole balanced transversely across the

shoulders, at each end of which a flat, shallow basket of fish is

suspended. The vegetable market adjoining that devoted to fish is a

brilliant sight in this favoured land. Heaps of scarlet pimentos and

tomatoes are flanked by enormous yellow gourds, and mountains of purple

grapes incredibly cheap, pomegranates, and big luscious pears jostle

piles of humbler vegetables of the kitchen, and some of the groups of

bright-coloured produce seem to reproduce the old pictures of the

mythical cornucopia overflowing with all the best fruits of the earth.

It is a long and tiring walk from here to Belem, but two lines of

electric trams go thither, one along the river-bank and the other by the

parallel route past Alcantara, and either will serve our turn. Belem is

now but a suburb of Lisbon, continuous lines of houses covering the two

miles of the route. There still remains, however, something of

distinction in this royal village, full of memories as it is of

Portugal’s great day of power and wealth. For here it was that at length

the dream came true, and those long vigils of the Fortunate King on the

savage peak of Cintra were rewarded by the coming of Vasco da Gama to

the squat, sturdy old tower of Belem, that had been in his yearning

thoughts through so many trials and dangers. King Manuel greeted his

great subject, who had brought to his native land the potentiality of

wealth illimitable, here in the village of Belem, at the mouth of the

Tagus; and as the explorer stepped ashore, the king, overjoyed at his

coming, swore to build upon that very spot a Jeronomite monastery

splendid enough to be worthy even of that great occasion. And he kept

his word; for two years afterwards, in 1500, the first course was laid

of a building which surpasses all others in its particular style, and in

some respects is one of the most remarkable ecclesiastical structures in

the world.