animating encouragement of the sovereign founder at length conquered every difficulty, and the work remains to this hour secure and perfect.” Close by is the great refectory of the monks, now used as a sort of lumber-room museum of débris; and leading from it the vast, vaulted kitchen, its stone roof blackened still by the smoke of centuries of cooking fires. The humble little ancient cloister of the original monastery still remains, with its rows of cells in the upper ambulatory. Here there is no Manueline exuberance or wealth, only reverent pointed Gothic, grave groined roofs and arches unadorned, enclosing, as of old, the sweet, quiet little garden that more than a century ago aroused the admiration of Beckford. [Illustration: THE CLOISTERS, BATALHA.] From there the distance is but a few steps to the “unfinished chapels”; but the contrast of feeling between the two places is wide indeed. The chapels consist of a sort of Lady chapel or apse built out at the back of the high altar, like Henry VII.’s chapel at Westminster. A large central chapel with ten smaller chapels round it rise to perhaps half their intended height, and roofless, for when King Manuel died in 1521 the work was stopped and has never been resumed. The first view of this fragment, and particularly of the great arch by which it was intended to connect it with the church, strikes an observer with astonishment that human brains and hands could ever compass such intricacy of design and execution. Convolutions more tortuous than those of Arab art, floridness more overloaded than Churriguerra ever dreamt of, boldness for which the only just word is insolence, here run riot unrestrained, fatiguing the eye, tiring the mind, and ending by palling upon the senses from mere over-exuberance. The lower portion and pillars, and the exterior of the chapels, are restrained and sober, and this makes the more overwhelming the arches and the upper pillars designed to support the roof. One feels that the design is that of a genius, but of a genius whom another step would have led to madness, and who threw aside all the accepted canons of his art. But, withal, though Beckford avoids detailed notice of these chapels, it is impossible even for the purist in architecture to pass such work by without some admiration being mixed with his surprise. The great arch leading into the church is the culminating point of the work; its western side being a mass of intertwined foliage, knots, cables, flowers, and concentric lines, cut in high relief in seven distinct mouldings or orders, and the inner line of the arch is decorated with a deep pendent open-work border; whilst forming part of the intricate design of the whole arch, the enigmatical words “_Tanias el Rey_” are repeated hundreds of times on small labels. What the words mean nobody knows, though the most probable guess is that they may be an anagram for “_Arte e Linyas_” (“art and lines,” in old Portuguese).