Beautiful examples are given in profusion in the works of Mr. Owen Jones, M. Girault de Prangey, Herr Hessemer, M. Coste and many others. [Illustration: PLATE 73 THE ALHAMBRA LA SALA DE LAS DOS HERMANAS MDW 1869] PLATE LXXIII. _GRANADA.--THE ALHAMBRA._ NICHE IN LA SALA DE LAS DOS HERMANAS. THAT the Moors themselves were fully conscious that in creating the Alhambra they were creating types of beauty for all generations, would be clearly manifest from the inscriptions of the Hall of the two Sisters, (from which our illustration is taken), even if every other of the hundreds of inscriptions the building contains in other apartments were destroyed. "I am the garden, and every morning do I appear decked out in beauty. Look attentively at my elegance, and thou wilt reap the benefit of a commentary on decoration." "Indeed, we never saw a palace more lofty than this in its exterior, or more brilliantly decorated in its interior; or having more extensive apartments--markets they are, where those provided with money are paid in beauty, and where the judge of elegance is perpetually sitting to pronounce sentence." "Here is the wonderful cupola, at sight of whose beautiful proportions, all other cupolas vanish and disappear." Such inscriptions are not all of them of this hyperbolic stamp, since some of them serve to record the names of illustrious founders, and to explain the uses of various parts of the structure. To an inscription of this kind we are indebted for an accurate knowledge of the uses of such niches as the one represented in my sketch. Many travellers and writers had supposed that their purpose had been to hold the slippers of the visitors, but this theory was entirely dispelled, when M. Pasqual de Gayangos read the inscription of the left niche of the Hall de las dos Hermanas. "Praise to God! With my ornaments and tiara[44] I surpass beauty itself, nay the luminaries in the Zodiac out of envy descend to me. "The water vase within me, they say, is like a devout man standing towards the Kiblah of the Mihrab,[45] ready to begin his prayers." The idea that these niches were used to hold water-bottles is further strengthened, as Mr. Owen Jones has justly remarked, by the existence of the mosaic linings amid the plaster work by which they were surrounded; as well as by the white marble slabs which serve for their base or floor. The wall and pier dados, which extend from these marble slabs to the beautiful Azulejos floor, are all made in elegant mosaic. Above the niche in the sketch appears the ingenious pendentive impost from which spring the great arches carried by the piers, with the characteristic ingrailed fringe work which was almost always retained even, as we see at Seville, in the latest Renaissance Mudejar work. [Illustration: PLATE 74 MDW 1869 GRANADA THE ALHAMBRA SALA DEL TRIBUNAL BORDER FULL SIZE] PLATE LXXIV. _GRANADA.--THE ALHAMBRA._ STUCCO DETAIL FROM THE SALA DEL TRIBUNAL.