These Coimbra youths wear no head covering, and affect a gravity of demeanour whilst in the streets that gives them all the appearance of budding priests. But the absence of a collegiate system brings both staff and students into more direct contact with the town than is the case with our older universities, and the peculiar learned atmosphere of the High at Oxford or King’s Parade at Cambridge does not exist. It is a stiff climb up the hill to the university, and the cathedrals. The former is built round three sides of a large court, with a tower in one corner and an observatory in the open face, the enormous palace of the rector occupying one entire side of the square. Seven good light classrooms and a fine hall, senate-house, and examination rooms, give ample accommodation; and the view of the city from the end of the corridor containing the lecture-rooms is exceedingly fine. The library is a gorgeous gilt and over-decorated room in the florid taste of the eighteenth century, the worst possible style for a place of quiet study; and almost the only attractive feature in the exterior of the university is the fine Manueline doorway to the chapel in the great quadrangle. Here twisted cables, rich mouldings, floreated crockets and pinnacles, armillary spheres and crosses, the usual notes of the style, mark the work as being of the period when Portugal was ebullient with feverish energy and ambition. Hard by is the bishop’s palace, now almost a ruin, but with some lovely bits of Manueline, and a delightful sixteenth-century courtyard like a scene upon the stage. The old cathedral (Sé Velha) upon the same hill, is perhaps the most perfect and unspoilt specimen of pure Romanesque of the twelfth century in the Peninsula. The deeply recessed west door, with round arch, quadruple ball mouldings, finely decorated Byzantine Romanesque pillars, and a large, recessed window in the same style above, occupy a square projecting battlemented tower flanked on each side by other square towers at the corners. On the south side the early renascence door reaching to the battlemented roof of the aisle is practically in ruins; but the pure, solid Romanesque of the rest of the building stands sturdy as ever after eight centuries. Small and grave, the nave and aisles, with the beautiful round-headed, recessed clerestory windows and capricious Romanesque Byzantine capitals, remain unmarred, though gilt and alabaster altars and chapels clamour for notice, and splendid sarcophagi of bishops and nobles on all sides contrast with the stern lines of the original building. Two features of the more recent periods deserve attention, the truly superb high-altar of Flemish workmanship of the first years of the sixteenth century, and the circular chapel of the Soares family, dated 1566. I could not tear myself away from the contemplation of the exterior of this old Sé on the hill over Coimbra, and at night when the darkness of the ancient city