The chapel on the north side of São Roque nearest the altar is the beautifully decorated chapel of St. John. It had been for centuries the poorest chapel in the sanctuary; but with the advent of King John V., at the dawn of the eighteenth century, the new monarch declared his intention of making the shrine of his patron saint the richest altar in Portugal. And he did so, with gifts both lavish and beautiful, an example naturally followed by his courtiers; so that when the Jesuits were expelled, the treasures of St. John, the property thenceforward of the State, formed a museum of their own. The objects exhibited, monstrances, reliquaries, crosses, altar furniture, banners, frontals, and vestments, are of surpassing magnificence; although they often attract more by their intrinsic worth than by the purity of their taste, as, for instance, the silver-gilt altar candlesticks ten feet high, and the great silver _repousé_ altar front: but as specimens of the decorative art—Italian, French, and Portuguese—of their period, they are well worth study. Lower down the hill stands the beautiful ruined Gothic-Manueline church of the Carmo, now an archæological museum, filled with many fragments of the older buildings of Lisbon saved from the ruin of the earthquake that wrecked the Carmo itself. Lisbon abounds in public gardens of almost tropical luxuriance. The fine plantations before the big classical church of the Estrella, the park of the Necessidades palace, the square of the Principe Real, the Avenida itself, and the pretty garden of the Gloria already referred to, might for the vegetation in them almost be in the West Indies; whilst the Botanic Gardens, especially, can show palm groves to be matched nowhere in Europe, except at Elche in the east of Spain. And not palms alone grow here in a way wonderful in the midst of a populous city, but cacti, aloes, daturas, and magnolias bloom with great luxuriance, and huge tropical forest trees from South America thrive in the open as if on their native soil.