Chapter III: Part 3

Passages obstructed with manuscripts and bales of prayers are passed, and we are in the temple. It is, as I expected, of great magnificence. Walls, ceilings, columns, all is in golden lacquer, the high frieze representing leaves and bunches of enormous peonies very full-blown and sculptured with so much skill that they seem ready to drop their leaves at the least breath to fall in a golden shower upon the floor. Behind a colonnade, in the darkest place, are the idols and emblems, in the midst of all the rich collection of sacred vases, incense-burners, and torch-bearers.

Just now it is the hour of Buddhist service. In one of the courts, a gong, with the deep tones of a double-bass, begins to strike with extreme deliberation. Some bonzes in robes of black gauze with green surplices make a ritualistic entrance, the passes of which are very complicated, and then they go and kneel in the centre of the sanctuary. There are very few of the faithful; scarcely two or three groups, which seem lost in this great temple. There are some women lying on the matting, having brought their little smoking-boxes and their little pipes; they are talking in very low voices and smothering the desire to laugh.

However, the gong begins to sound more rapidly and the priests to make low bows to their gods. It sounds still faster, and the bows of the bonzes quicken, while the priests prostrate themselves upon their faces upon the earth.

Then, in the mystic regions something happens that reminds me very much of the elevation of the host in the Roman cult. Outside, the gong, as if exasperated, sounds with rapid strokes, uninterruptedly and frantically.

I believe that I have seen everything now in this palace; but I still do not understand the disposition of the halls, the plan of the whole. If alone, I should soon become lost in it, as if in a labyrinth.

Happily, my guide comes to take me out, after having put my shoes on me himself. Across new halls of silence, passing by an old and gigantic tree, which has miraculous properties, it seems, having for several centuries protected this palace from fire, he conducts me through the same gate by which I entered and where my _djin_ are waiting for me.

WARWICK CASTLE

LADY WARWICK

The character of ancient buildings, the various styles of architecture which they present to us, their beauties as well as their blemishes, enable any one whose darkness may be lightened by the diviner radiance of a happy power of imagination to recall the persons and the events with which these buildings have been associated. The gloomy feudal fortress carries the mind back to the Middle Ages; the abbey, with its cloisters and windows and all the surroundings of a dim religious light, reminds us of days when the Head of the Church was indeed Christ’s Vicar here upon earth; while the palace suggests, side by side with its stories of games played at that great game in which men are but as pawns, pictures of gallant gentlemen and fair ladies who, though being dead, yet live before us. England is not so rich in these varied combinations of palace, abbey, and tower as is France, for instance, and particularly Touraine. Many of our most famous mediæval castles have been suffered to fall into decay, or, worse still, have been improved into modern shape by the rash hand of idle innovators.

There is one among our castles, however, which neither Time’s defacing fingers nor man’s innovating hand has despoiled--Warwick Castle.

Possibly there is no place of this sort so well known to the whole English world over, situated as it is within that Shakespeare country from which proceeded those melodious sounds that yet fill the world. It has always been the Mecca of the best and noblest of literary pilgrims from America. Nearly half a century ago Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote for an American magazine a series of sketches, in one of which, entitled “About Warwick,” he tells us how “through the vista of willows that droop on either side into the water we behold the grey magnificence of Warwick Castle uplifting itself among stately trees and rearing its turrets above their loftiest branches. We can scarcely think the scene real, so completely do the machicolated towers, the long line of battlements, the massive buttresses, the high-windowed walls, shape out our indistinct ideas of the antique time.”

After all a castle, even so famous a one as Warwick, is not so interesting in itself as the scenes it has witnessed and the people who have lived in it or have visited it. The history of Warwick Castle, for the last three hundred and fifty years at least, has been no small part of the history of England. Personal and local history in England does not so much begin with the Reformation as it does in other countries; but this one thing is certain, that between the pre-Reformation world and ourselves there is a great gulf fixed which the historian has tried in vain to bridge. Not that the place before that could have been devoid of interest: no castle in the stormy times of the Wars of the Roses could have enjoyed the happiness of having no history; and, surely, if any did, Warwick was not one of them. Its very position, situated in the heart of England, must, from the time when the Great Alfred’s daughter built the keep (“the monument of the wisdom and energy of the mighty Ethelfleda”), have been such that, in all the numerous brawls and butcheries dignified by the name of civil war, the possession of it must have been a matter of supreme importance. And so it was nearly four centuries before the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses that William the Conqueror had made Warwick the base of his operations for his campaign in the North. The fortress he built there has gone--not one stone left upon another, and so utterly perished that the very site of it is pure guess-work. The legendary Guy and all his feats may be dismissed from any account which makes any pretence to be historical. There is a curious account of the garrison of Warwick Castle in the time of Henry II., when all his legitimate sons were in arms against him, and the two illegitimate sons of Fair Rosamond alone remained faithful. It was occupied for the King; and the sheriff’s account rendered for the victualling of the place was this: “xi. _li._ xiii. _d._ for 20 quarters of Bread Corn; xx. _s._ for 20 quarters of Malt; c. _s._ for 50 Biefs salted up; xxx. _s._ for 90 cheeses; and xx. _s._ for salt then laid in for the victualling thereof.”

Of the importance of Warwick Castle in the Middle Ages we can well form an idea from Dugdale’s statement:--

“Of what regard it was in those times may be discerned by the King’s precept to the Archbishop of York, for requiring good security of Margery, sister and heir to Thomas, then Earl of Warwick, that she should not take to husband any person whatsoever in whom the said King could not repose trust as in his own self: the chief reason being given in these words, ‘Because she has a Castle of immense strength, and situated towards the Marshes.’”

No mention of Warwick Castle would be complete if it left out the famous Earl--“the King-Maker,” and the “Last of the Barons.” Never was the “Bear and Ragged Staff” held in such high esteem as between 1455 and 1470. And when, a few years after the King-Maker’s death, the avaricious Henry VII. annexed his various manors to the Crown, he got possession of over a hundred of them, to say nothing of the whole of the Channel Islands. A contemporary tells us that “at the Earl’s house in London six oxen were usually eaten at breakfast, and every tavern was full of his meat, for he that had any acquaintance in his family should have as much sodden--_i. e._, boiled--as he could carry on a long dagger.”

The Castle had remained for a very considerable period in the possession of the successive earls. It next passed to the ill-starred George, Duke of Clarence, and upon his death, “being seized into the King’s hands, it continued in the Crown a great while.”

When the famous John Dudley became Earl of Warwick, the Castle was granted to him, as well as divers lands which had belonged to former earls. Of his fate in connection with the unhappy Lady Jane Grey there is no need to speak here. The Castle and all his estates, upon his attainder, escheated to the Crown. Thanks to the favour with which Robert Dudley, better known as the Earl of Leicester, was regarded by Queen Elizabeth, his brother Ambrose received from that queen a grant of Warwick Castle, together with the dignities of Earl of Warwick and Baron de l’Isle, in 1561. Three years later his brother Robert became Earl of Leicester.

There were other subjects beside Lord Burghley who groaned inwardly under “the extraordinary chardg in Enterteynment of the Queen.” Elizabeth had more than the ordinary passion of the time for “rich shews, pleasant devices and all manner of sports that could be devised.” Notwithstanding the extent of her various progresses east and west and north and south, there seemed to be always something freshly arranged for her entertainment. In 1572 on her way to Kenilworth, she stayed at Warwick, and visited the Earl of Warwick at the Castle she had granted him eleven years before. She came to Warwick “on the 12th day of August, after dinner, about three of the clock, with the Countess in the same coach.”

Evelyn, as the author of _Silva_ well might do, did not think much of the gardens in 1654. To bring them to perfection was reserved for that luckless of the heads of the Grevilles, George, the second Baron, who “planned the park by his taste and planted the trees with his hand.” The second son, Robert, who became the fourth Lord Brooke, was one of the six lords sent by the House of Peers, together with twelve of the members of the House of Commons, to present to Charles II. at the Hague, “the humble invitation and supplication of the Parliament: That His Majesty would be pleased to return and take the government of the Kingdom into his own hands.” He was made Recorder of Warwick, and being a great traveller added much to the embellishment of the Castle. It was to him that the fitting up of the state apartments is due, and he worthily continued to follow in the footsteps of his predecessors in the title. His successors from one generation to another took pride above everything else in the adornment and beautification of their castle. In 1746 the eighth Baron was created Earl Brooke, and in the last year of the reign of George II. the Earldom of Warwick, which had been conferred in 1618 on the family of Rich, becoming extinct, devolved upon Lord Brooke. The son of this first Earl of Warwick was one of the most reckless of all connoisseurs, and Warwick Castle is indebted to him for many valuable gems which his uncle, Sir William Hamilton, collected. Many of the finest specimens of artistic work at Warwick bear testimony to his taste, but the enlargement and improvement of the grounds about the Castle are his special work, and he expended over £100,000 in beautifying the interior of his home.

The entrance to the Castle consists of a plain embattled gateway, leading to a picturesque winding roadway, cut, for upwards of a hundred yards, through the solid rock, and overhung with shrubs, creepers, and trees. This roadway conducts to the outer court, where a grand view of the outer walls suddenly bursts upon the visitor, the main features of which are Guy’s Tower on the right, the Gateway in the middle, and Cæsar’s Tower on the left.

Guy’s Tower, so named in honour of the legendary warrior, was built by the second Thomas de Beauchamp in the reign of Richard II., being completed in 1394. It is twelve-sided, thirty feet in diameter at the base, with walls ten feet thick, and rises to a height of a hundred and twenty-eight feet. This tower contains five floors, each floor having a groined roof and being subdivided into one large and two small rooms, the sides of which are pierced with numerous loopholes, commanding in various directions the curtains which the tower was intended to protect. A staircase of a hundred and thirty-three steps leads to the summit, which is crowned by a machicolated parapet. The vault beneath has been constructed of great strength, apparently for the purpose of supporting on the roof some ponderous and powerful engine, calculated to annihilate anything which could be brought against it. The details of the Castle can be best observed from this tower, and it commands a fine view of the surrounding country, extending for many miles. The second-floor chamber, now used as a muniment room, was the place of confinement of the Earl of Lindsey, who, with his father, was taken prisoner at the battle of Edge Hill.

Cæsar’s Tower was erected between 1350 and 1370 by the first Thomas de Beauchamp, and it is a marvel of constructive skill. It is an irregular polygon, a hundred and forty-seven feet in height, containing four stories, each with a groined roof, and is crowned by a boldly projecting machicolation. The part facing outward forms three segments of a circle, the general construction being such as to constitute it a fortress of the most formidable character. It is built on the solid rock, and was therefore impervious to the miner. The loopholes throughout are most scientifically contrived, not being cut in the centre of the merlons in each instance, but being pierced in positions commanding the most advantageous situations, and being made available for the long or crossbow. The lower edges of the loopholes are also sloped at the exact angle requisite to clear the gallery below. The archers were securely protected by wooden screens, termed mantlets, and by leather curtains, as well as by the roofs above them. The sloping base of the tower constituted another formidable medium for launching missiles against the enemy, being so constructed that a stone or metal projectile, launched from the machicolation above, would rebound with a point blank aim into the breasts of the attacking force beneath.

The Gateway was constructed in the Fourteenth Century, and was in ancient times approached by a drawbridge, which formerly spanned the moat, but is now replaced by a stone arch. On the inner side of this is the Barbican, projecting some fifty feet from the wall, and rising two stories in height above the archway. It is flanked by two octagonal turrets, loopholed for the purpose of defending the bridge and its approaches. Within the drawbridge is a portcullis, and behind the portcullis are four holes overhead, through which blazing pitch, hot lead, or other scarifying compounds could be poured on the heads of the assailants....

The spacious Inner Court is nearly two acres in extent. In front stands the Mound or Keep, studded with trees and shrubs, and crossed by the fortifications, in which the Northern Tower forms a prominent object. On the right, connected by walls of enormous strength, are two incomplete towers, termed the Bear and Clarence Towers, the former begun by Richard III., and the latter probably by his brother, George, Duke of Clarence. On the left, extending to the Hill Tower at the base of the Mound, is the inhabited part of the Castle, altered and enlarged at various times since it was first built, but with so much skill as to be in perfect keeping with the general aspect of the whole.

A fortress is said to have existed here in Roman times; and Ethelfleda, daughter of Alfred the Great, is stated to have erected a keep or dungeon on the Mound in the year 915, and this again is stated to have been enlarged in the time of the Conqueror.

Warwick Castle still stands by itself amongst English castles. It not only brings before us the people whom it had witnessed itself, from William the Conqueror down to Queen Victoria, but it enables us to represent what the baronial castles--Kenilworth and a host of others, which have fallen into decay--once were: by it we can reconstruct their halls and their bowers, their chapels and their dungeons, and can reproduce them to ourselves as they were when great kings and dukes and lords, who have long since crumbled into dust, filled them with their sound and fury, which now signifies nothing: we can see the Beauchamps and the Nevills and the Plantagenets, and those that went before them and those that came after them, pass through its galleries in knightly procession: we can be present there with Queen Elizabeth and Lord Leicester when all was revelry and mirth; or with the stout old Sir Edmund Peto, in that dark hour when he hung out a cross with a flag upon it in defiance of the Papists. As we walk from gallery to gallery, and from apartment to apartment, we can see, as in some splendid and stately museum, everything which has beautified and adorned the lives of seven centuries of English nobles. Over and above all this, we can see in Warwick Castle the continuity of English life, ever changing but yet ever the same; and as we view objects which illustrate the arts and fashions and tastes and fancies of a bygone world, we can feel conscious of the debt we owe to those who, mindful of the responsibility bequeathed to them, have not been backward in amassing treasures to be an “everlasting possession, not a sight to be seen and then forgotten.”

THE ALHAMBRA

EDMONDO DE AMICIS

We arrived before a great gateway that shut in the street; Gongora said to me, “Here we are!” I entered.

I found myself in a great grove of trees of immeasurable height inclining towards each other on both sides of a wide avenue that ascends the hill and is lost in the shade; they are so close together that a man can pass between them with difficulty and wherever you look, you can see nothing but trunks so thickly set that they seem to shut in the road like a continuous wall. The trees interlace their branches above the avenue; not a ray of sunlight can penetrate the wood; the shade is dense, and from every side the rivulets murmur and the nightingales sing. You breathe here the freshness of spring.

“We are already in the Alhambra,” Gongora said to me, “turn around and you will see the towers and the embattled walls of the enclosure.”

“But where is the palace?” I asked.

“That is a secret,” he answered, “let us walk on at random.”

We advanced by an avenue parallel to the great central road, and one that wound towards the summit of the hill. The trees above our heads formed a roof of verdure that hid the sky; and the grass, the brushwood and the flowers made on both sides two charming espaliers of brightness.

“Here is the gateway!” cried Gongora.

I turned around as if I had been pushed, and I saw a few steps before me a large square tower, of a sombre red, crowned with embattlements, and its door surmounted by a horseshoe arch upon which you saw sculptured a key and a hand.

My guide told me that it was the principal entrance to the Alhambra, and that it was called the Gate of Justice, because the Arab Kings were accustomed to pronounce their sentences beneath that arch. The key means that this door is the key to the fortress, and the hand is the symbol of the five principal precepts of Islam: Prayer, Fasting, Benevolence, Holy War, and Pilgrimage to Mecca.

We passed under the gate, and continued to ascend by an embanked road: finally we came to the top of the hill, in the middle of an esplanade surrounded by a parapet and set with bushes and flowers. I was standing before a great palace in the style of the Renaissance, half in ruins and flanked by some small and miserable-looking houses.

We entered through a little doorway, crossed a corridor, and found ourselves in a court.

We were in the _patio de los Arraynes_ (Court of the Myrtles), which is the largest in the building, and which presents at once the appearance of a court, a hall, and a garden. A large rectangular basin, full of water, surrounded by a hedge of myrtle, extends from one side to the other of the _patio_, and mirrors the arches, the arabesques, and inscriptions of the walls. To the right of the entrance are two rows of Moorish arches, placed one upon the other, and upheld by light columns; and on the opposite side of the court rises a tower with a door, through which may be seen the half-dark interior halls and the tiny twin-windows, and beyond the windows the blue sky and the peaks of the distant mountains. The walls are ornamented up to a certain height with splendid mosaics, and from the mosaics upward to the ceiling with arabesques of the most delicate design, which seem to scintillate and change at every step; and here and there between the arabesques and along the arches, Arabic inscriptions comprising salutations, sentences, and proverbs wind about and interlace like garlands.

Near the entrance one reads in Kufic characters: “Salvation eternal!--Benediction!--Prosperity!--Felicity!--Praise be to God for the welfare of Islam!”

In another place you see written: “I seek my refuge in the God of the Dawn.” Elsewhere: “O God, to Thee we owe eternal thanks and undying praise!”

In other places there are verses from the Koran, and entire poems in praise of the caliphs.

We entered the tower called the Tower of Comares, or vulgarly, of the Ambassadors.

The interior of the tower forms two halls; the first is called the Hall of the Boat: some persons say because it is shaped like a boat; others, because it was called by the Arabs Hall of the Baraka, or benediction, a word which the ignorant have corrupted into that of boat (_barca_). This hall does not seem of human workmanship; it is nothing but a stupendous interlacing of embroideries in the form of garlands, rose-work, branches, and leaves that cover the ceiling, the arches, the walls, on all sides, and in every way, crowded together, twisted, in net-work, one upon another, and combined in such a manner that they are all seen in a single glance and present an astonishing magnificence and an enchanting grace. I went up to one of the walls, I fastened my gaze at the beginning of an arabesque and tried to follow its twistings and windings: impossible! the eye loses itself, the mind becomes confused, and all the arabesques from the pavement to the ceiling seem to move and commingle to make you lose the thread of their inextricable net-work. You may make an effort not to look around you, concentrate your attention upon one little place of the wall, put your very nose in it, and trace the design with your finger: it is useless; in one minute the patterns become involved, a veil spreads between the wall and yourself, and your arm falls. The wall seems to you to be woven like a textile, crinkled like brocade, of open-work like lace, and veined like a leaf; you cannot look at it closely, you cannot fix the design in your mind,--that would be like counting the ants in an ant-hill.

After having looked around me a little, Gongora pushed me into the great Hall of the Ambassadors, which occupies the entire interior of the tower, for the Hall of the Barca in reality belongs to a little building, which although joined to the tower, is not a part of it. The Hall is square, very spacious, and lighted by nine large arched windows, in the form of doors, which present almost the aspect of alcoves, so thick are the walls; and each one of them is divided in two by a little column of marble that supports two elegant little arches, surmounted in their turn by two little arched windows. The walls are covered with mosaics and arabesques of an indescribable delicacy and variety of form, and innumerable inscriptions that are spread out like broad, embroidered ribbons over the arches of the windows, in the corners, upon the friezes, and around the niches where they placed vases filled with flowers and perfumed waters. The ceiling, which is very high, is composed of pieces of cedar wood, white, gilt, and blue, united in the form of circles, stars, and crowns; it forms a number of little domes, cells, and tiny arched windows from which a soft light falls; and from the cornice that joins the ceiling to the walls hang bits of stucco cut in facets and worked like stalactites and bunches of flowers. The throne stood in the centre before the window and opposite the door of entrance. From the windows on this side, you enjoy a magnificent view of the valley of the Darro; so deep and silent that it seems as if it must be fascinated by the majestic Alhambra; from the windows of the two other sides you see the walls of the enclosure and the towers of the fortress; and from the side of the entrance, in the distance, the light arches of the Court of Myrtles, and the waters of the basin reflecting the azure of the sky.

We left the tower with rapid steps, crossed the Court of Myrtles, and came in front of a little door opposite the entrance. We went about fifteen steps and stopped. We were in the Court of the Lions. If at this moment I had been forced to leave just as I had entered, I do not know if I could have described what I had seen. A forest of columns, a labyrinth of arches and embroideries, an indefinable elegance, an unimaginable delicacy, a prodigious richness, and I don’t know what that was aërial, transparent, and undulating, it was like a great pavilion of lace; the appearance of a building that would fall by a breath, a variety of lights, perspectives, mysterious shadows, confusion, a capricious disorder of little things, the majesty of a little palace, the gaiety of a kiosk, an amorous grace, an extravagance, a delight, a phantasy of a young and passionate maiden, an angel’s dream, a madness, a thing without a name; such is the first effect of the Court of Lions.

This is a court larger than a great ball-room, rectangular in form, with walls as high as one of the little Andalusian houses of one story. A light portico runs around it supported by graceful little columns of white marble, grouped in symmetrical disorder, by twos and threes almost without a base so that they seem to be starting from the earth like the trunks of trees, and adorned with varied capitals, tall and delicate, in the form of little pillars upon which curve tiny arches of the most graceful form. These arches seem not leaning upon, but suspended over the columns: one might call them curtains arranged upon the columns like ribbons or floating garlands. From the centre of the shortest sides, there advance two groups of columns that form two kinds of little square temples, each of nine arches, surmounted by a little cupola of many colours. The walls of these little temples and the outside wall of the portico are a veritable lace-work in stucco; they are ornamented, embroidered, bordered, cut and perforated from one side to the other, transparent as a web, and changing in design at your approach; here, flowers are nestling in the arabesques; there, stars; and farther away, bucklers, squares, and polygonal figures covered with ornaments of an infinite delicacy. All this ends in jagged points, in festoons, in ribbons fluttering around the arches, in species of stalactites, fringes, pear-shaped drops and acorns, that seem to undulate with the least breath of air. Long Arabic inscriptions run the entire length of the four walls, above the arches, upon the capitals, and upon the walls of the little temples. In the centre of the court there rises a great marble basin, upheld by twelve lions, and surrounded by a paved canal, from which gush four other small canals, that, describing a cross between the four sides of the court, cross the portico, dart into the neighbouring halls and unite with the other conduits cutting through the entire edifice. Behind the two little temples, and in the middle of the two other sides, there open suites of halls with immense open doorways, that allow you to see the dark background upon which the little white columns gleam as if they stood before the mouth of a grotto. At every step one takes into the court, this forest of columns seems to move and disarrange itself to arrange itself in a new way; behind a column that seems to stand alone, two, three, or sometimes a file of them, will show themselves; others will disappear, others will approach each other, and others will separate; in looking into the depths of one of these halls, you see everything change: the arches on the opposite side seem to be far away; the columns seem out of place, the little temples assume another form; you see through the very walls, you discover new arches and new columns, here in the bright sunlight, there in the shadow, elsewhere half illuminated by the soft light that passes through the perforations of the carving, and farther away they are lost in the darkness. Here is a continual changing of perspectives, distances, deceptions, mysteries, and optical illusions made by the architecture and the sunlight and your own over-excited and burning imagination.

“What must this _patio_ have been,” said Gongora, “when the interior walls of the portico were glistening with mosaics, the capitals of the columns gleaming with gold, the ceilings and vaults painted in a thousand colours, the doorways closed by hangings of silk, and the niches filled with flowers; and when beneath the temples and in the halls perfumed waters flowed, and when from the nostrils of the lions dashed forth twelve jets of water that fell back into the basin, and when the air was impregnated with the most delicious perfumes of Arabia! You should come here at sunrise; you should also come here at sunset and at moonlight to see the marvels of colour, light and shade! It would turn your head!”

We went to see the halls. On the eastern side there is one called the Hall of Justice, which you reach by passing under three large arches, each one taking the place of a door opening into the court. It is a long and narrow hall, of rich and bold architecture, the walls of which are covered with very intricate arabesques and precious mosaics, with points, bunches, and protuberances of stucco hanging from the arches, which crowd together, drop, spring from, press upon, and are superimposed upon each other, as if they disputed the very space, and showing even now traces of ancient colours which must have given to this ceiling the semblance of suspended fruits and flowers.

On the northern side of the court there is another hall called _de las Hermanas_ (the Two Sisters) from two large slabs of marble that are found in the pavement. It is the most gracious hall of the Alhambra. It is small, square, and domed with one of those vaults in the form of a cupola which the Spaniards call half-oranges, sustained by little columns and arches arranged in a circle, all cut to resemble a grotto of stalactites with an infinity of points and holes, coloured and gilded and so light that they seem to the eye as if hanging in the air: you would think that they would tremble like a curtain, at a touch, or evaporate like a cloud, or vanish like a lot of soap-bubbles. The walls of stucco, like those of the other halls, and covered with arabesques, of an incredible delicacy, are among the most astonishing productions of human fancy and patience.

We returned to the Court of the Myrtles, and visited the halls on the other side of the Tower of Comares, most of them half ruined, others transformed, some of them half bare, without either pavement or roof, but all worthy of being seen because of the memories they awaken, and also in order to understand the construction of the building. The old mosque was converted into a chapel by Charles V. and a large Arabian hall into an oratory; here and there you noticed the _débris_ of arabesques and ceilings of carved cedar; the galleries, the courts, and the vestibules seemed the remains of a palace devoured by fire.

At this point I truly thought that there was nothing more to be seen, and I committed the fresh imprudence of saying so to Gongora. At this blow he could no longer contain himself, and, leading me into the vestibule of the Court of Myrtles, before a plan of the building that hung upon the wall, he said:

“Look around you, and you will see that all the halls, all the courts, and all the towers that we have visited up to now, only occupy the twentieth part of the space enclosed by the walls of the Alhambra; you see that we have not yet visited the remains of three other mosques, the ruins of the Hall of the Cadi, the Water-Tower, the Tower of the Infantas, the Tower of the Prisoner, the Tower of Candil, the Tower of the Pico, the Tower of the Poignards, the Tower of the _Siete Melos_, the Tower of the Captain, the Tower of the Sorcerer, the Tower of the Heads, the Tower of the Weapons, the Tower of the Hidalgos, the Tower of the Chickens, the Tower of the Dice, the Tower of Homage, the Tower of the Vela, the Tower of the Powder, the ruins of the house of Mondejar, the military quarters, the Iron Gate, the interior walls, the cisterns, and the promenades; for you must know that the Alhambra is not solely a palace, but a town, and that it would take a lifetime to search for arabesques, to read inscriptions and to discover each day some new view of the hills and mountains, falling into an ecstasy once at least during the twenty-four hours!”

And I thought I had seen the Alhambra.

LAMBETH PALACE

JOHN RICHARD GREEN

A little higher up the river, but almost opposite to the huge mass of the Houses of Parliament, lies a broken, irregular pile of buildings, at whose angle, looking out over the Thames, is one grey weather-beaten tower. The broken pile is the archiepiscopal Palace of Lambeth; the grey, weather-beaten building is its Lollards’ Tower. From this tower the mansion itself stretches in a varied line; chapel and guard-room, and gallery, and the stately buildings of the new house looking out on the terrace and garden; while the Great Hall, in which the library has now found a home, is the low picturesque building which reaches southward along the river to the gate.

The story of each of these spots will interweave itself with the thread of our narrative as we proceed; but I would warn my readers at the outset that I do not propose to trace the history of Lambeth in itself, or to attempt any architectural or picturesque description of the place. What I attempt is simply to mark, in incident after incident which has occurred within its walls, the relation of the house to the primates whom it has sheltered for seven hundred years, and through them to the literary, ecclesiastical, the political history of the realm.

Nothing illustrates the last of these relations better than the site of the house itself. It is doubtful whether we can date the residence of the archbishops of Canterbury at Lambeth, which was then a manor-house of the see of Rochester, earlier than the reign of Eadward the Confessor. But there was a significance in the choice of the spot, as there was a significance in the date at which the choice was made. So long as the political head of the English people ruled, like Ælfred, or Æthelstan, or Eadgar, from Winchester, the spiritual head of the English people was content to rule from Canterbury. It was when the piety of the Confessor and the political prescience of his successors brought the kings finally to Westminster that the archbishops were permanently drawn to their suffragan’s manor-house at Lambeth. The Norman rule gave a fresh meaning to their position. In the new course of national history which opened with the Conquest, the Church was called to play a part greater than she had ever known before. Hitherto the archbishop had been simply the head of the ecclesiastical order--a representative of the moral and spiritual forces on which the government was based. The Conquest, the cessation of the great Witenagemotes in which the nation, however imperfectly, had till then found a voice, turned him into a tribune of the people.

Foreigner though he might be, it was the primate’s part to speak for the conquered race the words it could no longer utter. He was, in fact, the permanent leader (to borrow a modern phrase) of a constitutional opposition; and, in addition to the older religious forces which he wielded, he wielded a popular and democratic force which held the new king and the new baronage in check. It was he who received from the sovereign whom he crowned the solemn oath that he would rule not by his own will, but according to the customs, or, as we should say now, the traditional constitution, of the realm. It was his to call on the people to declare whether they chose him for their king; to receive the thundered “Ay, ay,” of the crowd; to place the priestly unction on shoulder and breast, the royal crown on brow. To watch over the observance and order into religious duties; to uphold the custom and law of the realm against personal tyranny; to guard, amidst the darkness and brutality of the age, those interests of religion, of morality, of intellectual life, which as yet lay peacefully together beneath the wing of the Church--this was the political office of the primate in the new order which the Conquest created; and it was this office which expressed itself in the site of the house that fronted the king’s house over Thames.

From the days of Archbishop Anselm, therefore, to the days of Stephen Langton, Lambeth only fronted Westminster as the archbishop fronted the king. Synod met over against council; the clerical court of the one ruler rivaled in splendour, in actual influence, the baronial court of the other. For more than a century of our history the great powers which together were to make up the England of the future lay marshalled over against each other on either side the water.

With the union of the English people, and the sudden arising of English freedom, which followed the Great Charter, this peculiar attitude of the archbishops passed necessarily away. When the people itself spoke again, its voice was heard, not in the hall of Lambeth, but in the Chapter-house which gave a home to the House of Commons in its earlier sessions at Westminster. From the day of Stephen Langton the nation has towered higher and higher above its mere ecclesiastical organization, till the one stands dwarfed beside the other as Lambeth now stands dwarfed before the mass of the Houses of Parliament. Nor was the religious change less than the political. In the Church as in the State, the archbishops suddenly fell into the rear. From the days of the first English Parliament to the days of the Reformation, they not only ceased to be representatives of the moral and religious forces of the nation, but stand actually opposed to them. Nowhere is this better brought out than in their house beside the Thames. The political history of Lambeth lies spread over the whole of its site, from the gateway of Morton to the garden where we shall see Cranmer musing on the fate of Anne Boleyn. Its ecclesiastical interest, on the other hand, is concentrated in a single spot. We must ask our readers, therefore, to follow us beneath the groining of the Gate-house into the quiet little court that lies on the river-side of the hall. Passing over its trim grass-plot to a doorway at the angle of Lollards’ Tower, and mounting a few steps, they will find themselves in a square antechamber, paved roughly with tiles, and with a single small window looking out towards the Thames. The chamber is at the base of Lollards’ Tower; in the centre stands a huge oaken pillar, to which the room owes its name of the “Post-room,” and to which somewhat mythical tradition asserts Lollards to have been tied when they were “examined” by the whip. On its western side a doorway of the purest early English work leads us directly into the palace chapel.

It is strange to stand at a single step in the very heart of the ecclesiastical life of so many ages, within walls beneath which the men in whose hands the fortunes of English religion have been placed from the age of the Great Charter till to-day have come and gone; to see the light falling through the tall windows with their marble shafts on the spot where Wyclif fronted Sudbury, on the lowly tomb of Parker, on the stately screen-work of Laud, on the altar where the last sad communion of Sancroft originated the Non-jurors. It is strange to note the very characteristics of the building itself, marred as it is by modern restoration, and to feel how simply its stern, unadorned beauty, the beauty of Salisbury and of Lincoln, expressed the very tone of the Church that finds its centre there.

And hardly less strange it is to recall the odd, roistering figure of the primate, to whom, if tradition be true, it owes this beauty. Boniface of Savoy was the youngest of three brothers out of whom their niece, Eleanor, the queen of Henry the Third, was striving to build up a foreign party in the realm. Her uncle Amadeus was richly enfeossed with English lands; the Savoy Palace in the Strand still recalls the sentiment and the magnificence of her uncle Peter. For this third and younger uncle she grasped at the highest post in the state save the crown itself. “The handsome archbishop,” as his knights loved to call him, was not merely a foreigner as Lanfranc and Anselm had been foreigners--strange in manner or in speech to the flock whom they ruled--he was foreign in the worst sense: strange to their freedom, their sense of law, their reverence for piety. His first visit set everything on fire. He retreated to Lyons to hold a commission in the Pope’s bodyguard, but even Innocent was soon weary of his tyranny. When the threat of sequestration recalled him after four years of absence to his see, his hatred of England, his purpose soon to withdraw again to his own sunny South, were seen in his refusal to furnish Lambeth. Certainly he went the wrong way to stay here. The young primate brought with him Savoyard fashions, strange enough to English folk. His armed retainers, foreigners to a man, plundered the City markets. His own archiepiscopal fist felled to the ground a prior who opposed his visitation. It was the prior of St. Bartholomew’s by Smithfield; and London, on the king’s refusal to grant redress, took the matter into her own hands. The City bells swung out, and a noisy crowd of citizens were soon swarming beneath the walls of the palace, shouting threats of vengeance.

For shouts Boniface cared little. In the midst of the tumult he caused the sentences of excommunication which he had fulminated to be legally executed in the chapel of his house. But, bravado-like, this soon died before the universal resentment, and “the handsome archbishop” fled again to Lyons. How helpless the successor of Augustine really was, was shown by a daring outrage perpetrated in his absence. Master Eustace, his official, had thrown into prison the prior of St. Thomas’s Hospital for some contempt of court; and the prior’s diocesan, the Bishop of Winchester, a prelate as foreign and lawless as Boniface himself, took up the injury as his own. A party of his knights appeared before the house at Lambeth, tore the gates from their hinges, set Master Eustace on horseback, and carried him off to the episcopal prison at Farnham. At last Boniface bowed to submission, surrendered the points at issue, recalled his excommunication, and was suffered to return. He had learned his lesson well enough to remain from that time a quiet, inactive man, with a dash of Continental frugality and wit about him. Whether he built the chapel or not, he would probably have said of it as he said of the Great Hall at Canterbury, “My predecessors built, and I discharge the debt for their building. It seems to me that the true builder is the man that pays the bill.”

From the moment when Wyclif stood in Lambeth Chapel the Church sunk, ecclesiastically as well as politically, into non-existence. It survived merely as a vast land-owner; while its primates, after a short effort to resume their older position as real heads of their order, dwindled into ministers and tools of the crown. The gate-tower of the house, the grand mass of brick-work, whose dark-red tones are (or, alas! were, till a year or two since) so exquisitely brought out by the grey stone of its angles and the mullions of its broad arch-window, recalls an age--that of its builder, Archbishop Morton--when Lambeth, though the residence of the first minister of the crown, had really lost all hold on the nobler elements of political life. It was raised from this degradation by the efforts of a primate to whose merits justice has hardly as yet been done. First in date among the genuine portraits of the Archbishops of Canterbury which hang round the walls of the Guard-room at Lambeth is the portrait of Archbishop Warham. The plain, homely old man’s face still looks down on us, line for line, as the “seeing eye” of Holbein gazed on it three centuries ago. “I instance this picture,” says Mr. Wornum, in his life of the painter, “as an illustration that Holbein had the power of seeing what he looked on, and of perfectly transferring to his picture what he saw.” Memorable in the annals of art as the first of that historic series which brings home to us, as no age has ever been brought home to eyes of after-time, the age of the English Reformation, it is even more memorable as marking the close of the great intellectual movement which the Reformation swept away.

With the Reformation, in its nobler and purer aspects, Lambeth, as we have said, had little to do. Bucer, Peter Martyr, and Alasco gathered there for a moment round Cranmer; but it was simply as a resting-place, on their way to Cambridge, to Oxford, and to Austin Friars. Only one of the symbols of the new Protestantism has any connection with it; the Prayer-book was drawn up in the peaceful seclusion of Oxford. The party conferences, the rival martyrdoms of the jarring creeds, took place elsewhere. The memories of Cranmer which linger round Lambeth are simply memories of degradation; and that the deepest degradation of all, the degradation of those solemn influences which the primacy embodies to the sanction of political infamy. It is fair, indeed, to remember the bitterness of Cranmer’s suffering. Impassive as he seemed, with a face that never changed, and sleep seldom known to be broken, men saw little of the inner anguish with which the tool of Henry’s injustice bent before that overmastering will.

None of the great theological impulses of this age or the last, it is sometimes urged, came out of Lambeth. Little of the theological bitterness, of the controversial narrowness of this age or the last, it may fairly be answered, has ever entered its gates. Of Lambeth we may say what Matthew Arnold says of Oxford, that many as are its faults, it has never surrendered itself to ecclesiastical Philistines. In the calm, genial silence of its courts, its library, its galleries, in the presence of its venerable past, the virulence, the petty strife, the tumult of religious fanaticism finds itself hushed. Among the storms of the Wesleyan revival, of the Evangelical revival, of the Puseyite revival, the voice of Lambeth has ever pleaded for a truth, simpler, larger, more human than theirs. Amidst the deafening clamour of Tractarian and Anti-Tractarian disputants, both sides united in condemning the silence of Lambeth. Yet the one word that came from Lambeth will still speak to men’s hearts when all their noisy disputations are forgotten. “How,” a prelate, whose nearest relative had joined the Church of Rome, asked Archbishop Howley, “how shall I treat my brother?” “As a brother,” was the archbishop’s reply.

CHÂTEAU DE BLOIS

JULES LOISELEUR

The castle of Blois would be without a rival in France if Fontainebleau did not exist. The first time we enter that interior court, the four sides of which each tell the history of a great period of architecture, we are dazzled by the throng of memories and ideas that start from these four great pages. The obedient stone, in accordance with the epoch, has recorded the suspicious precautions, the paternal confidence, the chivalric enthusiasm and the majestic isolation of the masters of this royal dwelling. Pure feudalism is written in the mighty walls of the fortress of the Counts of Blois. The transitional style, one of the most important examples of which is offered by this castle of Louis XII., marks the change from the feudal system to the unitary monarchy prepared by Louis XI. This youthful monarchy, already absolute though tempered by the great aristocratic individualities, already glitters and triumphs in this brilliant façade built by the young victor of Marignan. By the side of this splendid façade, like a severe master beside a turbulent pupil, the severe profile of the castle, built by Mansart, suggests the absolute and uncounterpoised monarchy of Louis XVI.;--unity without diversity, force without grace.

Thus the unknown architect who cut the walls of the mighty fortress out of the rock for Thibault le Tricheur; and the artists, native in all probability and therefore unknown, who drew the arabesques of Francis the First’s stairway; and Joconde, the architect of Louis XII.; and Mansart, the architect of Gaston of Orleans; and all those bold stone-workers, unknown to themselves, doubtless, in those four façades have shown the four chief phases of royal authority. “Monuments are the true writings of the nations.”

Above the city of Blois, upon a triangular plateau, whence the view embraces the vast panorama of the left bank of the Loire, formerly stood a fortress, the origin of which is lost in the obscurity of ages. It was one of those redoubtable holds in which the great feudal barons watched for their prey and kept what they captured. It was one of the most formidable of all, and it is stated that it was never reduced, nor even besieged. Three narrow ascents, shadowed on either side by high walls, gave access to it. A double ring of fortifications was in front of the donjon, which, in case of siege, was the last resort of the master of this formidable abode. The first enclosure, called the lower court, or fore-court, to-day forms a courtyard of considerable size, at the end of which rises the front built by Louis XII. Ruined towers with thick walls still testify of the precautions taken to defend this first circuit.

Immense offices, a church the foundation of which dates back from the Eleventh Century, and which must not be confounded with the chapel that is to be seen in the present castle-yard, and lodgings for the canons and servants of this church formed a vast circle of buildings around this first courtyard where also were to be seen the habitations of the count’s principal officers. There, in succession, afterwards arose the house from the window of which Georges d’Amboise, counsellor to Louis XII., conversed with his master; the house of the Duc d’Epernon, who favoured the flight of Marie de’Medicis; and that other mansion where, on June 13th, 1626, Louis XIII. caused the arrest of the Prince de Vendôme, accused of being concerned in the Chalais conspiracy.