“At last, after having drank reciprocally all ye healths that we thought would be required on either side, we retir’d to repose. The next morning we were no sooner dres’t than we found ye whole college assembled in ye next room at our levee. We breakfasted in state, at ye end of a long table with ye rest seated round ye room, and admiring ye peculiar grace with which we put every morsel into our mouths. After breakfast we were attended thro’ ye convent, and had everything explain’d to us, which I must own gave me great pleasure. They are of ye Cistercian order, and ye richest in Portugal, possessing a vast tract of land which is said to bring them in £50,000 per annum. Their magnificence is in every way proportionable. Their church is Gothic, but extremely noble, ye plate, jewels and ornaments, copes, etc. are as rich as possible.... They have no taste or design in their expenditure, and seem to study richness rather than elegance in all they do. As they reign, so they entertain, like princes over the district. In the evening we saw their great altar lighted up at vespers, which at the end of a long Gothic aisle had a most striking effect with ye organ and voices altogether impressing upon the mind most solemn awe.” Remains of the tasteless splendour referred to are still to be seen on all sides. The gilt-trimmed chancel arch, the high altar, with its blue starred globe and wooden gilt rays in the centre, and popes carved and gilt in niches each side, amidst gold whirligigs galore, are as incongruous as can be with the stern, simple nave: and the altars of the north transept and retro choir all present the same features, some of them, moreover, being in a lamentable state of dilapidation, inciting to derision rather than devotion. In the north transept, hard by the thirteenth-century sepulchral stones of Affonso II. and Affonso III., is a dark but beautiful Gothic hall, the holy of holies of the monastery, “the chapel of the tombs,” the resting-place of several of the earlier princes of the royal house. [Illustration: UNDER THE ACACIAS, ALCOBAÇA.] The most striking objects in it are two magnificent sarcophagi in florid decorated Gothic. The recumbent figures of king and queen upon them, as fair and perfect as the day they were sculptured, rest, not hand in hand as upon most similar tombs, but foot to foot. For these are the sepulchres of Pedro the Just and his murdered mistress, Ines de Castro, done to death by servile nobles beside the “fountain of love” in the “garden of tears” at Coimbra, and the faithful king ordered the body of himself and his beloved to be laid thus, so that when the universal trump should call him to arise, the first object upon which his reopened eyes should rest would be her, who, though unwed, was yet his wife through all eternity.