The chapels, some of which are very beautiful with carved figures of the good sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish period, are separated from the nave by a handsome black and white marble balustrade of the same period. The transepts are exceptionally majestic, and, like the nave, of good unadorned Romanesque-Gothic, but the tiled walls and overloaded altars—the latter still greatly venerated by the faithful—sadly mar the simple grandeur of their main plan. The chancel is magnificent, with its elaborately bossed and groined roof, and fine carved choir-stalls, the work of the Fleming, Oliver of Ghent, who carved the now plundered stalls for the Templars’ church at Thomar; and over the noble chancel arch again the devices of John II. and Manuel, with the arms of Portugal, are carved. In the chapels, and especially in one of the transepts, are some paintings of the highest interest; but the light is so bad that it is impossible to inspect them carefully. They can, however, be seen sufficiently well—notwithstanding their deplorable condition—to prove that some of the great mysterious Flemish-Portuguese masters of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries must have painted them. One representing St. Anthony preaching to the fishes is perfectly exquisite in its minute conscientiousness. I was informed that in the bishop’s palace twelve fine paintings of the same school, attributed to the brothers Van Eyck, are kept in similar semi-darkness and neglect; but these I could not see. It is a thousand pities that these art treasures and others of the same sort which I have mentioned,[10] should not be rescued and reverently kept.