It is impossible to imagine a ruin more stately than that of the grand mediæval castle which, upon a gentle eminence on the outskirts, dominates the town. Granite built upon a granite base, the walls sharp and clear to-day, look as if cut but nine years ago instead of nine centuries. Here is the dignity of age without its feebleness. A vast battlemented outer wall, with corner bastions and pointed crenellations, surrounds the majestic keep, the monolithic battlements of which, huge single stones, stand uninjured still by time or the more destructive hand of man. The cyclopean masses are reddened now by lichen and stained by weather, but nine centuries have failed to crumble them, and they stand a splendid monument of the first of the two outstanding epochs in Portuguese history, when the nation was stirred with vast ambitions and endowed with heroic energy to fulfil them. Affonso Henriques of Guimarães was the protagonist of the first epoch, that of national independence; Prince Henry the Navigator, the protagonist of the second, that of national expansion. Guimarães is delightful, and an artist might spend a month in its quaint streets and alleys without exhausting the “bits” that call for delineation. One charming old-world corner is the square in which stands the church that alone remains of the vast monastery founded by the Leonese Princess Munia—the Collegiada the townspeople call it, although I believe it bears officially another name. The early florid Gothic tower is a beautiful one, and more beautiful still the detached rood canopy at its west end, with its quaint mixture of early Gothic with Greek and Byzantine ornament. Opposite this is the low-arched sixteenth-century arcade beneath the town-hall, and the houses that surround the irregular little praça are in picturesque keeping with the rest. There is in a street called Largo dos Trigães, one of the finest stretches of crenellated wall that ever I saw. It must be three hundred yards long, and at least five-and-twenty feet high, independent of its pointed battlements, and is in the most perfect preservation though many centuries old. It is said to enclose the grounds of a disestablished monastery, for Guimarães was in old times monastic or nothing.