"Other cathedrals," says Mr. Symonds, "may surpass that of Monreale in sublimity, bulk, strength or unity of plan. None can surpass it in the strange romance with which the memory of its many artificers invests it. None can exceed it in the richness and glory, the gorgeousness of a thousand decorative elements." [Illustration: CAPITAL FROM MONREALE] Of the original buildings of the Benedictine monastery which formed a part of the church, and were built at the same time, none but the cloister remains. This cloister is in its kind one of the most superb examples of twelfth century architecture to be found in Europe, and is one of the largest as well as one of the most beautiful in the world. The cloisters of St. John Lateran, St. Paul-beyond-the-Walls, Ste. Scholastica, at Subiaco, are all admirable, but they are inferior to that of Monreale, both in detail and in grandeur of total effect. [Illustration: PLATE XXV SCREEN, CHURCH OF SAN JUAN DE LA PENITENCIA, TOLEDO] [Illustration: CAPITAL FROM MONREALE] [Illustration: CAPITAL FROM MONREALE] Imagine a vast central space, one hundred and sixty-nine feet square,--not a flat grass-plot scattered with decaying tombs, nor planted with the severe box-wood and funereal cypresses that give so gloomy an aspect to most cloisters, but a blooming garden, adorned with shrubs and flowering vines, laid out in parterres of exquisite verdure, where, in the shade of myrtle and citron trees, fountains play, their jets caught in marble basins, only to overflow and nourish the living green about them. This garden is walled in by four long corridors, sheltered by arcades of small pointed arches with something Oriental in their curves, supported by two hundred and sixteen coupled columns of white marble, with a group of four at each angle, all of them surmounted by carved capitals of different designs, the slender shafts ornamented with mosaics and incrusted with precious marbles, some patterned in lozenges, some curved with floral designs, some fluted after the antique manner, some wound with capricious spirals,--a file of shining columns of fairy-like aspect. And, looking at this perennial garden with its ever-running fountains, surrounded by so Oriental an arcade, one might fancy one's self transported to a monastic Alhambra, or the interior of an Arabian-Night's palace. [Illustration: CAPITAL FROM MONREALE]