French style was preferred. It is but a step from the Graça to a splendid church which is deservedly one of the boasts of Evora, and, for skilful solidity of construction, one of the most extraordinary churches in Portugal, if not in Europe. Situated in a wide praça, and flanked on one side by shady groves of cork-trees, stands the great square church of S. Francisco, all that remains intact of an important Franciscan monastery of immense antiquity. Adjoining it, until recent times, stood a royal palace, of which this church and monastery were privileged to form a part; and the Franciscans of Evora were altogether very lordly monks indeed. Without a tower, as is usual with monastery churches, the big square building, with its rows of battlemented roof ridges, looks more like a fortress than a church; and from the peculiarity of its construction, it is safe to say that, unless the hand of man or some great natural convulsion destroys it, the next four centuries will have as little effect upon it as the last four have had since its construction at the end of the fifteenth century. The great west porch extends the whole width of the building in fine Romanesque-Gothic. The arches of this porch are almost Moorish in form, with elaborated twisted-cord capitals; and the peculiar arrangement of supports noticed in the nave at Alcobaça is also seen here, where the great inner supports of the arches do not reach the ground, but start suddenly three-quarters up the pillar, producing the effect of the lower portion having been cut away. The double doorway itself is fine early Manueline marble, surmounted by the pelican and young, the device of John II., and the armillary sphere, which was that of his son, King Manuel the Fortunate. The inside of the church is very striking. The immense width of nave (42 feet) is unbroken by pillars or aisles, the side chapels being apparently embedded in the walls and separated from each other by fine pure Gothic pillars on the wall surface, each pillar being carried right up to the spring of the roof and its uninterrupted arch carried over to the corresponding pillar on the other side, the effect being one of great width and spaciousness, as the length of the nave to the chancel arch is no less than eighty-eight feet.