Chapter VI: Part 6

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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