ing with scarcely a moulding or ornament except on its richly cut, fantastically designed capitals.
Out of the cloister there lead many chapels filled with twelfth and early thirteenth century tombs. The sculptor's tradition here has something peculiar and fascinating—an almost clumsy massiveness in the forms which heightens the archaic dignity of the gesture and expression of these recumbent kings and princes. Nowhere else did I get so high an opinion of Spanish plastique of this period—and then it was quite distinct from the French, lacking its elegance of finish, but with a sombre dramatic power which is very impressive.
But Salamanca means most of all the University. One enters through a great Plateresque gateway not unlike a glorified version of the gateway of St Johns at Cambridge. Inside is a large two-storeyed cloister very plain except for the complicated honey-combing of a rich Artesonado ceiling in the upper storey. On the ground floor are the entrances to the class rooms, one of them the vast dark thirteenth century cellar in which Fray Luis de Leon lectured. It was to him that Salamanca owed its greatest European reputation and his lecture room has been piously preserved with its original benches and desks. These are hardly more than tree trunks with one side flattened and are by now inscribed with the initials and dates of whole centuries of students.
I have at least one defect as a traveller, I am curiously insensitive to the sentimental association of objects. Caesar's razor-strop would leave me cold and I would not cross a street to see all Napoleon's knick-knacks; but somehow I felt a sentimental thrill at the sight of this class room. Perhaps it is that in the whole of human history no adventure seems to me so thrilling as this of the desperate voyage after truth in the face of grudging nature and hostile man.
How risky this adventure was we may judge from the story of Fray Luis de Leon himself. The charge of heresy was always so easy to bring and so hard to refute that so striking a figure could hardly fail to be the object of attack. Consequently he found himself one day transferred from his professional chair at Salamanca to the Inquisition prison at Valladolid. There he spent five years of meditation before the Inquisitors were able to detect his innocence.
A pleasant story is told of his return. He had been wont every day to resume his previous lecture, beginning with the words: "We
