Kings, queens, and princes, whose names now mean little even in the country where they held sway and nothing elsewhere, lie around in tombs of varying magnificence, together with débris and relics of times earlier than any of them. The usual dense ignorance is displayed by the guardian of the objects he is supposed to describe; for he points out two very small ancient sarcophagi, one of them obviously Byzantine Romanesque, and the other probably pre-Christian, and tells you gravely that they once contained the bodies of Ines de Castro’s children. Both of them are centuries earlier than her time, and her only children grew up and survived her. But this is not more absurd than the representation, in the current English “History of Portugal,” of a lady in the height of the Portuguese fashion of the end of the seventeenth century as Ines de Castro, who lived in the fourteenth. The cloister of the monastery presents the characteristics of two styles. The lower part is pure early Gothic, like the church and chapter-house, with simple rose lights in each arch; but the upper storey has evidently been added or rebuilt in the early sixteenth century in good Manueline taste; and in one corner there is a very beautiful fountain in the same style bearing the monogram of the “Fortunate” monarch Manuel himself. The vast refectory, of which Beckford spoke so sneeringly, as dirty and slovenly, is entered by a handsome Manueline doorway, and is now being restored. The entrance to the sacristy is also a fine specimen of Manueline, but inside the bad taste of the late seventeenth-century monks is rampant. All around the great square apartment are carved and gilt niches, in which are dozens of life-sized busts also carved and gilt, of saints and bishop, each of which has a hollow for a relic upon the breast, all now despoiled of their contents; and the precious treasury of jewels, ornaments, and embroidery that aroused the envious admiration of the virtuoso Beckford, has all disappeared, many of the most beautiful and precious objects being now in the Museum of Fine Arts at Lisbon, a storehouse of mediæval goldsmith’s work unsurpassed in Europe, though almost completely neglected both by residents and visitors to the capital.