The beautiful little cloisters of the cathedral are of a later date than the church—grave and simple Gothic of the late fourteenth century, with three small pointed lancet arches in each span, and a plain round light in the tympanum above. But even here the eighteenth century has done some damage by building out highly ornamental buttresses between the main spans. All around on the inner wall of the cloister is a decoration which abounds in nearly every Portuguese church that has lived through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—namely, large pictorial representations in blue and white tiles, like those commonly connected with the town of Delft. In the churches these tile pictures usually represent scenes from Scripture history, with a large admixture of heathen mythology or ordinary emblematic fancies, as here in Oporto, and the effect is quaint and not unpleasing. One of the things indeed which most strongly strike a stranger in Portugal, in the north especially, is the almost universal employment of glazed tiles, _azulejos_, both inside and outside buildings of all kinds, the majority of the better sort of dwelling-houses being entirely covered outside by tile designs in colours, sometimes very elaborate and beautiful. The custom exists to some extent in Spain, but is not so common there as in Portugal. In each case, however, the taste and original manufacture, like the name of these tiles, are clearly Moorish, and in some of the older edifices, to be mentioned later, the tiles themselves date from a period when Moors or Mudejares produced them.