Page:Lisbon and Cintra, Inchbold, 1907.djvu/57

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The Royal Pantheon

been known as the Sé S. Vicente da Fora (without). Phillip II greatly enlarged and beautified the church; though gravely injured by the earthquake the original character has been preserved. The vaulted roof of marble strikes attention, also the artistic baldachino over the high altar, the work of Machado de Castro, the same sculptor whose name is attached to the statue of D. José and many other objects of art in the country. Annexed to the church is the old monastery once belonging to the Augustinians, but now the residence of the Cardinal Patriarch Archbishop of Mytilene.

The walls of the cloisters are lined with azulejos representing, curiously enough, the fables of La Fontaine. The entrance to a dim, low chapel stands at the further end, and here the kings of the House of Bragança, from the time of D. João IV have found a last resting-place. The bier of D. Luiz, the latest defunct monarch of Portugal, occupies the chief position in this Royal Pantheon, and until recently the silent faces of the embalmed bodies were visible to visitors through glass apertures in the coffins. The spirit of meditation and retrospection seems to hover over those solemn effigies resting in their eternal sleep, guarding in inimitable and awful silence secrets of the historic past that can never be solved. Here rest also the ashes of the great Constable, D. Nuno Alvares Pereira, to whom reference will be made more fully in his close connexion with the building of the Carmo.

Out on the Largo before the church and cloisters the Judas trees are in bloom, the purple-pink flowers standing out a blaze of colour against the blue of the river and sky seen through the steep descending streets. We pass in front of S. Vicente, and turn beneath an archway at the side into a lane which opens on the quadrangular square of

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