The first place you enter is a vast courtyard, at the extremity of which is the portal of a church, presenting no remarkable feature, except some colossal statues of prophets, with gilt ornaments, and figures painted rose-colour. This courtyard is flagged, damp, and cold; the angles are overgrown with grass; you no sooner place your foot in it than you are oppressed with _ennui_, just as if you had a weight of lead upon your shoulders; you feel your heart contract; you think that all is over--that every joy is henceforth dead for you. At a distance of twenty paces from the door you smell an indescribable icy and insipid odour of holy water and sepulchral caverns, which is borne to you by a current of air loaded with pleurisy and catarrh. Although, outside, there may be thirty degrees of heat, the marrow freezes in your bones; you imagine that the warmth of life will never again be able to cheer the blood in your veins, which has become colder than a viper's blood. The air of the living cannot force its way through the immense thickness of the walls, which are as impenetrable as the tomb, and yet, in spite of this claustral and Moscovitish cold, the first object I beheld, on entering the church, was a Spanish woman kneeling on the ground, beating her breast with one hand, and with the other fanning herself with equal fervour. I recollect that her face had a kind of sea-green tint, which makes me shiver even now, whenever I think of it. The cicerone who conducted us over the interior of the edifice was blind, and it was really most marvellous to see with what precision he stopped before the pictures, naming the subject of each one, and the artist by whom it was painted, without the least hesitation or mistake. He took us up to the dome, and led us through an infinity of ascending and descending corridors, which rivalled in complication the "Confessional of the Black Penitents," or of the "Château of the Pyrenees," by Anne Radcliffe. The old fellow's name is Cornelio; he was the merriest creature in the world, and appeared quite to take a delight in his infirmity.