AUGUST 3.♦ On the following day, the French completed their batteries upon the right bank of the Guerva, within pistol-shot of the gate of St. Engracia, so called from a splendid church and convent of Jeronimites, situated on one side of it. This convent was, on many accounts, a remarkable place. Men of letters beheld it with reverence, because the excellent historian Zurita spent the last years of his life there, observing the rules of the community, though he had not entered into the order; and because he was buried there, and his countryman and fellow-labourer, Geronymo de Blancas, after him. Devotees revered it, even in the neighbourhood of our Lady of the Pillar, for its relics and the saint to whom it was dedicated. According to the legend, she was the daughter of Ont Comerus, a barbarian chief, in the pay of the Romans, by whom the city of Norba Cæsarea, (situated near the Tagus, between the present towns of Portalegre and Alcantara) was given him, together with its district, for his service in recovering it from Cathelius, a chief of the Alemanni. His daughter, Encratis, or Encratide, (for from one of these names Engracia has been formed) was brought up a Christian, and espoused to a governor on the Gallic side of the Pyrenees, to whom she was sent with a suitable escort. Their way lay through Cæsarea-Augusta, where the Præses, or Governor of Spain, Publius Dacianus, the bloodiest minister of the tenth persecution, was at that time endeavouring to extirpate Christianity. Engracia, either preferring martyrdom to her unknown spouse, or imagining that her rank would be her safeguard, visited the governor for the purpose of interceding in behalf of the Christians, and remonstrating against his cruelty. Thus much of the legend is probably fabulous; but certain it is, that a virgin of that name was tortured under that persecution; and, though she survived, was venerated as a [8]martyr in that city, before the close of the century in which she suffered. Just, however, as her claim is to pious remembrance, her church, and the divine honours which have been paid to her, were procured by fraud. Angels are said to have descended at her death, and to have officiated at her funeral, bearing tapers and thuribules, and singing hymns of triumph. During the Moorish captivity, her relics disappeared; they were discovered towards the close of the fourteenth century, which was the great age for inventions of this kind. There stood at that time, upon the site of this memorable convent, an old church, dedicated to the Zaragozan martyrs, of the tenth persecution, and called the _Iglesia de las Masas_, in memory of an early specimen of Catholic ingenuity. Dacianus, holding relic-worship in as much contempt as the Christians did his idolatry, in order to prevent them from indulging in it, burnt the bodies of the martyrs, together with those of some malefactors, thinking that their ashes would be undistinguishable; nevertheless, the