The church at Reus, too, is interesting, from the fact that the contract for its erection is preserved, and has been published by Cean Bermudez. It dates from A.D. 1510. This town is a few miles only from Tarragona, and after seeing Poblet and Vallbona, the ecclesiologist would do well, I think, to make his way across to Lérida, instead of returning to Barcelona, as I did. But I wished much to examine the Collegiata at Manresa on my way to Lérida, and for this purpose the line I took was on the whole the best. I bade farewell to Tarragona with a heavy heart, and with a determination to avail myself of the first chance I may have of returning to look once more at its noble and too little known cathedral.[277] [Illustration: TARRAGONA:--Ground: Plan: of: Cathedral: Plate XV. Published by John Murray, Albemarle St. 1865] CHAPTER XIV. BARCELONA The architectural history of Barcelona is much more complete, whilst its buildings are more numerous, than those of any of our own old cities, of which it is in some sort the rival. The power which the Barcelonese wielded in the middle ages was very great. They carried on the greater part of the trade of Spain with Italy, France, and the East; they were singularly free, powerful, and warlike; and, finally, they seem to have devoted no small portion of the wealth they earned in trade to the erection of buildings, which even now testify alike to the prosperity of their city, and to the noble acknowledgment they made for it. The architecture of Cataluña had many peculiarities, and in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when most of the great buildings of Barcelona were being erected, they were so marked as to justify me, I think, in calling the style as completely and exclusively national or provincial, as, to take a contemporary English example, was our own Norfolk middle-pointed. The examination of them will, therefore, have much more value and interest than that of even grander buildings erected in a style transplanted from another country, such as we see at Burgos and Toledo; and beside this, there was one great problem which I may venture to say that the Catalan architects satisfactorily solved--the erection of churches of enormous and almost unequalled internal width--which is just that which seems to be looming before us as the work which we English architects must ere long grapple with, if we wish to serve the cause of the Church thoroughly in our great towns.