Going from the great Plaza de la Constitucion down a narrow street to the north, we soon came out on another large irregular open place, frequented chiefly by second-hand clothesmen, whose wares would be deemed bad even in Houndsditch, and whose wont it seems to be to induce their customers to make complete changes of their apparel behind scanty screenworks of cloths. At the angle of the further side of this Plaza is the grand church and convent of San Benito. The monks are, of course, all gone, as they are everywhere in Catholic Spain, and the convent is turned into a barrack; the church is left open, but unused, and the more valuable portions of its furniture, its stalls and Retablos, have been carried away for exhibition in another religious house, now used as a museum! Valladolid seems to have been a city of religious houses; and when the revolution, following on civil wars, made so clean a sweep of religious orders, that not only does one see no monks, but even Sisters of Mercy are scarcely ever met[84], there was nothing, I suppose, to be done but to convert these buildings to the first miserable purpose that suggested itself; and we ought perhaps to be thankful when we find a church like San Benito simply desolate and unused, and not converted to some purely secular use. The ground-plan of the church is given on Plate III. At the west end are the remains of a tower, which seems never to have been completed, and which, though of vast size, is so poor, tame, and bald in detail, that it could hardly have produced a successful effect if it had been finished. The whole design of the exterior of the church is extremely uninteresting; but the interior is much more impressive, being fine, lofty, and groined, and lighted chiefly by large clerestory windows, aided by others high up in the aisle-walls. The groining is all very domical in section, and rather rich in ribs; and the grand scale of the whole work, and the simplicity of the piers--cylinders with eight engaged shafts round them--contribute to produce something of the effect of a building of earlier date. The bases of the columns are of enormous height from the floor, and their caps are generally carved with stiff foliage. Several altars, monuments, and chapels have been inserted between the buttresses of the north wall; and there is one old tomb on the north side of the high altar, with a sculpture of the Crucifixion. The buttresses on the exterior all rise out of a continuous weathered basement, and there is no variety in their design in any part.