It is impossible to deny the grandeur of the internal effect of this room. The details are entirely unlike what I should wish to see repeated; but the proportions, the contrasted simplicity and intricacy of the lower and upper part of the walls, the admission of all the light from above, and the magnificence of the roof, might all be emulated in a Gothic building, and I have seen few rooms which have appeared to me to be more suggestive of the right form and treatment for a picture gallery or saloon for any state purpose. The two synagogues I have described stand now in the most deserted and melancholy part of Toledo. The old _Juderia_, or Jews’ quarter, is decayed and abandoned. The Jews, of course, are all expelled from it, and the Christians seem to have avoided their quarter as though there were a curse on it. Samuel Levi, the founder of El Transito, built for himself a magnificent palace near it, of which, I believe, some part still exists, though I did not see it. The Moorish houses, which I must now shortly describe, appear to be very numerous and of all dates, from the twelfth century down to the conquest of Granada; and it seemed to me that up to this time almost _all_ the houses must have been the work of Moorish architects. The Jews and Moors were both very numerous bodies--so much so that Toledo is charged by an old writer with having had in it none others,--and there is nothing to show that the Christians ever employed any other architects. The common type of house is one which is completely Moorish in plan, even when the details are not so. It almost always had a long dark entrance passage, with an outer door to the street, studded thickly with nails of the most exaggerated size, and furnished with great knockers. The outer room or passage--ceiled with open timbers, boarded or panelled between--opens into the _patio_ or central court, over which in hot weather an awning or curtain could be hung. This _patio_ is surrounded by open passages on all sides, supported by wooden posts, or sometimes on granite columns, and the staircase to the upper floors rises from one angle of it. The woodwork is generally well wrought with moulded ends to the joists and moulded plates. Here are usually one or two wells, the court having been the impluvium where all the water from the roof was collected in a large cistern below the pavement, Toledo is still a clean city, and Ponz,[217] defending its credit from an attack by an Italian writer, maintains that the women are so clean that they wash the brick-floors of their houses as often as they do their dishes! [Illustration: Knocker and Nails on Door, Toledo.]