i had often before seen caldas in the height of the bathing season, when the midsummer heat made lisbon intolerable and inspired people with more or less imaginary maladies to get cured. the place then, with its crowds of visitors and pleasant parties, was bright and lively enough; but now that the last pleasure-seeker had fled, and the only people taking the wonderful health-giving waters were the few really sick, and the inmates of the great “queen’s hospital” adjoining the hot springs, caldas looked mean and ugly. the drives through the pine forests in the neighbourhood, it is true, are pleasant; but for a fortnight i had been passing through a glorious pine country much more diversified and elevated than these, and caldas had no fresh attractions to offer me. a visit to the famous factory of enamelled faience, charmingly situated in the 200midst of gardens, yielded an hour’s interest in the inspection of the late bordallo pinheiro’s fine sacred figure groups now in course of production for the shrines at bussaco, and the hundred curious palissy-like pieces in high relief, plates of fruit, fish, &c., which are the specialty of the factory. but that being finished the charms of caldas were exhausted, so far as i was concerned, and the train for cintra claimed me irresistibly.
the first station from caldas (obidos), with its little town, nestles at the foot of an eminence upon which another of the stupendous medi?val castles peculiar to portugal rears its massive battlements, castles in comparison with which most of the english feudal strongholds are mere sentry-boxes. for these portuguese fortresses were national outposts thrust forward successively into conquered or debatable land; bases for further extension southward and bulwarks against the return of the tide of islam. another two hours of travelling brought us into a country of red rolling hills, with a bold granite ridge on the east and a still loftier ridge beyond merging into the blue mist on the horizon. for miles on either side grand sweeps of flowering heather 201flushed against breaks and slides of ochre-earth, touched here and there with the light feathery green of the pines; whilst in the dips of hills sheltered valleys of bronzing vines and little white granges, slept tranquilly after the bustle of the just finished vintage. soon we get nearer the granite hills before us, and looming over the station, upon a great projecting spur of one of these there frowns another of these tremendous strongholds, from which, running towards the east and south between us and lisbon, there bars the way a series of gigantic ridges and peaks. most of the heights are capped by towers, and scored along the faces of the mountains may still be discerned lines and marks of earthworks and redoubts. these are the never-to-be-forgotten lines of torres vedras, by which the genius of wellington finally held the legions of napoleon at bay, and saved portugal—and incidentally europe—from the domination of the french.
all the earth seems soaked and saturated in sunlight and brilliant colour; little ancient towns, like runa, perched on the tops of cliffs, at the foot of which more modern hamlets cluster, testify to the changed conditions between the 202days when the first need was safety from aggression, and the later times when, the danger of wanton attacking being past, men sought accessibility and ease. acacias, aloes, canes, olives, and vines spreading down the plain, tell of a benign and equable climate enjoyed in security and peace; a beautiful and favoured land, where nature has done its best to make man happy without making him idle. as the twilight begins to fall we change trains at cacem, the junction of the small local line from lisbon to cintra, and thenceforward we travel due west towards the sea. before us looms a great isolated mountain, the “rock of lisbon,” which seafarers know so well, with its bold outline and its gleaming towers on the topmost crag.
“and cintra’s mountain greets them on the way.”
—childe harold, canto i.
the “mountain of the moon,” and of its goddess cynthia, devoted from the dawn of time to the worship of deities that, one by one, have been deposed, this long-backed hummock, stretching nearly fifteen miles from end to end and rising well-nigh two thousand feet above the plain, is one of europe’s acknowledged beauty spots, and, like a human professional beauty, on this 203occasion coyly hid its charms from too ready a discovery by cloaking its summit with a cloud as black as ink, forerunner of the coming night. the gradient of the line continues upward as we wind round the base of the hill, and it is quite dark when the terminal station of cintra is reached, and after a long drive upward the quaint little english hostelry, known to four generations of britons, welcomes me to dinner and to rest.
like the similar mountain of bussaco, the “rock of lisbon” is scored by ravines and dells innumerable, sheltered valleys open to the soft sea-breezes charged with grateful moisture; and from time immemorial the luxuriance and variety of its vegetation have been proverbial. at a time when lisbon, only some fifteen miles away, is sweltering and breathless within its south facing semicircle of hills, the slopes of the mountain of cintra are fresh and invigorating, and some of its gardens are a veritable paradise all the year round. but beautiful as it undoubtedly is, cintra owes much of its fame to its nearness and accessibility to the capital, and so far as english celebrity is concerned, to the accident of several influential englishmen persistently 204singing its praises at a time when lisbon was a fashionable winter and health resort.
the village of cintra lies in one of the folds of the great hill, at perhaps a third of its height up the side: a little swiss-looking pleasure-town round an open pra?a, like a set scene upon a stage. a few hotels and shops, a church, the inevitable big stone building at the most conspicuous corner, with the heavily barred windows on the level of the footpath, and the squalid prisoners begging and bandying repartee with the passers-by: at one end of the pra?a, a lovely ancient manueline cross upon a palm-shaded mound, at the base of which a picturesque group is usually lounging, and close by, the courtyard of an old, old palace whose most conspicuous features are two curious protruberances from the roof, looking like a cross between kentish oast-houses, and giant champagne bottles. this is cintra as seen from its central point, but over it all there towers that which gives unique distinction to its otherwise somewhat trite, self-conscious picturesqueness. sheer aloft upon a precipice a thousand feet and more above its roofs there stretch the mighty battlements and massive keeps of a huge castle of fawn-coloured stone, a castle so immense as to dwarf thomar, leiria, and even obidos almost to insignificance. long lines of crenellated walls following the dips and sinuosities of the crest of the peak appear to grow out of the mighty rounded boulders; some of these great masses of rock seeming to hang over perilously—as they must have done for thousands of years—top-heavy and threatening.
the old palace, cintra.
205to climb such an eminence looks impracticable when seen from the pra?a of the little town, and yet it is but a pleasant and easy walk up the zigzag road round the projecting shoulder of the hill. as i start in the early morning to ascend the two twin peaks, only one of which is visible from the pra?a, the air is indescribably sweet with the mingled freshness of the sea and the perfume of herbs and flowers. the way winds upwards between the trim walls of villas embosomed in gardens. ampelopsis, blood-red now, long trails of wistaria and starry clematis, and large fuchsia trees loaded with flower, hang over the pathway everywhere, whilst masses of heliotrope clothe the jutting gables and corners, and pervading all are the scent and sight of oceans of flowers. palms, planes, poplars, and firs shoot upward, and around their straight bare trunks there clusters a tangle 206of figs, laurels, mimosa, camellias, aloes, and cactus. on the outer side of the road, as the villas are left behind, you may look over the dwarf-wall down the tree-clad slopes into glens of deep shade, with here and there a glimpse through the branches of a vast sunlight plain far below, whilst on the inner side of the zigzag way, the mosses and ferns, and the pendent greenery of the precipitous hillside, with an occasional break into a deep ravine, exhibit at each turn and step some new beauty of tint or atmosphere. presently at a turn of the road, after half-an-hour’s climb, you see right over head the bare granite cliff covered with huge overhanging boulders, and on the summit a long stretch of yellow battlements and a huddle of enormous towers. the trees around us are mostly oaks now, and the grey boulders are covered on their inner faces with ivy and lichens, whilst clumps of purple crocuses star the grass by the wayside. the sun is as hot as july in england, but the breeze is delightfully fresh and pure, the sky of spotless azure, and the air so clear that the ancient fortress, still far above us, is seen in all its detail as if we had it near to us under a giant microscope.
207suddenly as i turned a corner there burst upon my view another and a loftier peak than the one upon which stands the moorish stronghold that had hitherto been my objective. a crag so inaccessible it looked, as to suggest that the imposing building upon it with its lofty towers was the work of a magician. the royal palace of the penha is this, piled up rather than built upon a sheer precipice.[2] here upon the highest point of the rock of lisbon was king manuel the fortunate wont to linger for hours and days for many months together, climbing up from his palace in the town below, that he might gaze far out upon the atlantic, watching and praying for the return of vasco da gama from his voyage to india round the african continent, 208the route that in two generations the impetus of prince henry the navigator had opened up. there was but a tiny jeronomite hermitage or penitentiary here in this savage eyrie to shelter the anxious king,[3] and during his vigils he vowed that if the great explorer came home successful he would build upon the spot a worthy monastery of the order in memory of the event. the work must have been a prodigious one, for even now the place is hardly accessible by carriages, and the quantity and the weight of material necessarily brought from below was enormous. this monastery like the rest, was disestablished and secularised by the state in 1834, and king ferdinand, the consort of the queen of portugal, and a first cousin of queen victoria and prince albert, bought the building for conversion into a royal palace, as it remains to-day, and here he lived the latter years of his life with his second wife, the ex-opera-dancer, the countess of edla. 209ferdinand altered his palace, in many cases with very doubtful taste, moorish and german baronial features being liberally grafted on to the manueline edifice, with the result that the whole building when seen closely is a pretentious muddle, saved from contempt by some of its ancient portions, and by its sublime situation.
the palace on the peak was soon lost to sight again on my climb upward, and the path led direct to the outer donjon of the moorish stronghold opening upon a narrow path cut along the face of the rock, and bordered on the outer side by a low stone wall. the view down over the steep, rocky slope, with the town of cintra far below, and the plain limitless beyond, is very fine, and the walls that border the path are clothed with mosses and ferns almost as lovely as those of bussaco. the fortress must have been impregnable by force; and indeed was only gained at last from the moors by treason, this very gate having been bought by the christians from an unfaithful guardian. this narrow path cut on the face of the precipice is the only practicable approach to the fortress, and leads soon to yet another gate flanked by a strong tower built upon one vast, solid boulder. the dells below are 210filled with billows of verdure; the face of the rock on the inner side of the path is covered with creepers, ferns, and flowers, whilst above them, high up in the dips near the summit, great trees lean over, shading the way by which we come. yet another strong gate tower we pass through; and with a sudden turn we are inside the fortress, on the right of us a ruined chapel, once a mosque, and on the left a watch-tower, with, at its foot, a monument upon which the cross is graven surmounting the crescent, emblematical of the fate of the adjoining chapel.
to describe in detail this prodigious ruin would be impossible in any reasonable space. the summit of the crag consists of two separate peaks at some distance from each other, the higher one occupied by the main keep, “the royal tower,” and long battlemented walls reach from one point to the other, with bastions at intervals and massive square keeps at the salient angles. on all sides within the great enclosure formed by the battlements, covering the whole summit, remains of towers and buildings of various sorts are scattered, amidst the dense growth of trees and brushwood that have intruded upon the space. the battlements, many of them built upon the rounded 211boulders that border the precipice and following the contour of the hill top, are strong and perfect still; and it needs but little imagination to people them again with the turbaned and mailed warriors, sheltered snugly behind them, watching for the advancing hosts of the christian king, certain that, so long as islam was true to itself, no force could take this stronghold of their race. the view over the battlements on all sides is tremendous. just below the walls a titanic scatter of boulders, varying in size from a few feet in diameter to the bulk of a cathedral, and then the descending folds of greenery, with the sunlit plains and clustering towns below; and there on the west, seemingly almost at the foot, a long stretch of breaker-strewn beach, and the blue line of the sea. the view on the cintra side is almost appalling, the drop from the battlements and boulders to the town being almost sheer, and on the south-east a great bay opens, and the mouth of the tagus bounds the prospect.
as i gazed, entranced at this wonderful scene, surrounded by yet sturdy relics of the war of civilisations eight centuries old; musing upon the immutability of nature’s face in comparison with even the most enduring works of man, i 212noticed a wire fixed on the face of the moorish battlement, and thence to a boulder, and so from point to point, i know not whither—to the palace or the adjoining peak, perhaps. a telegraph wire! a familiar object enough, but, as it seemed to me, strangely out of harmony with the stern battlements from which for centuries the sons of the prophet held back the advance of western civilisation.
the point upon which the moorish stronghold stands is connected with the higher site of the palace by a saddle-back dipping considerably and then rising very precipitously. the vegetation on all sides is marvellously luxuriant, and inside the well-kept gardens of the royal domain flowers and plants, temperate and sub-tropical, make the place a horticultural paradise. through graceful moorish archways, bright with alambresque decorations and azulejos, under rocky tunnels and over medi?val drawbridges, all redolent of the gimcrack taste of the forties, the upward way leads at length to the little inner patio of the castle, and here, at last, some of the manueline monastery still remains. it is little enough, a window here and a door there, and is almost swamped by modern alambresque and german 213baronial additions, but the ancient chapel in the patio is a gem. the beautiful groined ceiling especially attracts attention, but the pride of the place is the exquisite altar of translucent alabaster or jasper and black marble in the purest style of the classical renaissance, dated 1532, a thank-offering of king john iii. for the birth of an heir. the many groups of figures in alabaster are extremely beautiful, and as the whole structure turns upon a pivot the perfection of the work can be seen in various lights. a concession to the portuguese manueline taste of the time is made by the pendent festoons on each side of the altar, which are formed of two lengths of knotted and twisted cable in alabaster, a tour de force of execution, though rigid purists may perhaps question their artistic appropriateness.
the chapel is marred by the hard, bright german stained glass inserted in the principal window by king ferdinand; but the modern portuguese is very far from being critical in matters of art, and though hundreds of people yearly toil up the mountain to venerate the holy image of the virgin of the penha in this chapel, and the lovely ivory figure of st. john in the sacristy, no one apparently thinks of removing 214the flashing offence of the stained glass window in favour of some subdued medium more appropriate to this beautiful little church. a climb to the highest tower of the palace is said to be rewarded by a magnificent view. i was content to take it on trust, for i had already climbed high enough, and could hardly hope to behold a more striking prospect than those i had enjoyed from the castle battlements, and from the inner patio of the palace itself, which is perhaps the most striking of them all.
as i retrace my steps down the long zigzags to cintra again, and ever and anon look up at the heights from which i have come, they seem quite inaccessible. equally, or more so, does the somewhat lower, but even more precipitous eminence called the cruz alta, from which the prospect is of surpassing extent over land and sea.
“eis campinas que ao ceo seu canto elevam,
aqui o espa?o, alem a immensidade,”
“behold the plains their psalms raise to the sea,
here spread below in space, beyond immensity,”
as the portuguese poem on the base of the cross proclaims.
everywhere the flowers trail over the walls 215of villas, and the high palms within rock softly in the heliotrope scented breeze. very beautiful it is; but the gardens belong to other people, and are jealously closed by stone walls and iron gates. from above them, at hundreds of points all over cintra, you may command views of gardens of tropical luxuriance; but without permission of the wealthy owners you may not enter them. cintra’s beauty is not free like the sacred wood of bussaco, where you may wander at your will through purely sylvan scenery that not even cintra can surpass. the grandeur of the towering moorish stronghold on its crest of grey boulders is more imposing than anything bussaco can show, and the interior of some of the highly cultivated private gardens of cintra are as fine as any in europe; but, so far as the enjoyment of the mere traveller is concerned, i am inclined to agree with the opinion of those who hold that cintra’s fame is quite equal to its merits. beckford had very much to do with it. his friends the marialvas were amongst the first of the portuguese aristocracy, and owed the large palace of seteaes, where byron and some guide-books erroneously say that the humiliating convention of cintra was signed by 216the victorious english generals. beckford’s visits to them and to the court at cintra inspired him with an enthusiastic admiration for the place, and his letters are full of references to its beauty. to the immensely wealthy and eccentric young englishman desires and their accomplishment ever went hand in hand, and beckford purchased a picturesque valley and slopes of the mountain some two miles from the town round the shoulder of the hill towards the west. here he built an eccentric house, partly in the moorish style, and here he displayed the virtuoso tastes and exotic luxury which afterwards made fonthill famous.[4]
all that money and skill could do was lavished upon the gardens in the ravines and slopes of monserrate; and long before beckford died 217the place became famous throughout europe. sir francis cook, viscount de monserrate, to whom monserrate belonged for many years, greatly extended and improved the property, and his son, sir frederick cook, the present owner, has followed the same course of munificent maintenance of this earthly paradise; with the result that now the beauties of the glens at monserrate are probably unequalled in their own way. it was the middle of october when i visited the gardens on this occasion, although i had seen it in all the glory of its spring and summer splendour on other visits, and the luxuriance of the vegetation showed as yet no signs of waning. great magnolias, daturas, and bougainvilliers were in full flower, with roses, clematis, brilliant coleas, and immense quantities of heliotrope. tree ferns, aloes, agaves, and palms grew with a freedom in the open air that not even the hot-houses of kew could surpass, whilst the crimson ampelopsis and golden-leaved maples presented gorgeous masses of colour. some of the sylvan views are perfectly charming; but after all, one feels that one is simply an interloper seeing the showplace on sufferance by payment of a shilling—which 218the owner gives to a charity—and a sylvan scene, perhaps less lovely, but in which i could roam at will, as at bussaco, would have had greater attraction for me.
upon a peak opposite monserrate, and belonging to the same owner, stands a humble little monastery that once belonged to the franciscan-capuchins. it is a quaint and curious place, the cloister, a tiny one, being joined to a rock, out of which the cells are excavated. these and the doors and ceilings of the cloister are lined with cork bark for warmth and cosiness in this exposed position, and for centuries the hermit-monks lived and prayed on this peak overlooking almost as great a panorama as the jeronomites on the high crest of the penha. franciscans and jeronomites are alike gone now; but in this case at least the place has been saved from desecration, and the little chapel is maintained with reverent care by sir frederick cook, to whom the place belongs. byron and southey, too, did much for the fame of cintra. in a room at lawrence’s hotel, commanding a fine view of plain and sea, the former wrote a portion of “childe harold,” and his references in verse 219to the beauty of the place are numerous. writing of the cork convent, byron refers thus to honorius, a rigid ascetic who in a cave there lived long years in self-imposed penance:—
“deep in yon cave honorius long did dwell,
in hope to merit heaven by making earth a hell.”
volumes of poetry, indeed, have been in the aggregate written about cintra. byron made it practically his first stage of “childe harold’s pilgrimage,” and went in raptures over it:—
“lo, cintra’s glorious eden intervenes
in variegated maze of mount and glen.
ah, me! what hand can pencil guide or pen
to follow half on which the eye dilates,
through views more dazzling unto mortal ken
than those whereof such things the bard relates
who to the awe-struck world unlocked elysium’s gates—
the horrid crags by toppling convent crown’d,
the cork-trees hoar that clothe the shaggy steep,
the mountain moss by scorching skies embrown’d,
the sunken glen whose sunless shrubs must weep,
the tender azure of the unruffled deep,
the orange tints that gild the greenest bough,
the torrents that from cliff to valley leap,
the vine on high, the willow branch below,
mixed in one mighty scene with varied beauty glow.”
the poet, in one of his letters to his mother complaining of the dirt and discomfort of 220lisbon, says: “to make amends for the filthiness of lisbon and its still filthier inhabitants, the village of cintra, about fifteen miles from the capital, is perhaps in every respect the most delightful in europe. it contains beauties of every description, natural and artificial; palaces and gardens rising in the midst of rocks, cataracts, and precipices; convents on stupendous heights; a distant view of the sea and the tagus.... it unites in itself all the wildness of the western highlands with the verdure of the south of france.”
robert southey, too, calls cintra “the most blessed spot in the habitable globe,” and beckford’s letters are crowded with eloquent passages to the same effect. “the scenery,” he says, “is truly elysian, and exactly such as poets assign for the resort of happy spirits.... the mossy fragments of rock, grotesque pollards and rustic bridges you meet with at every step, recall savoy and switzerland to the imagination; but the exotic cast of the vegetation, the vivid green of the citron, the golden fruitage of the orange, the blossoming myrtle, and the rich fragrance of the turf, embroidered with the brightest coloured and most aromatic flowers, 221allow me, without a violent stretch of fancy, to believe myself in the garden of the hesperides.”
the portuguese poets have of course dwelt much upon the beauties of cintra, especially almeida garrett, the principal portuguese poet of modern times. one stanza by him is cut upon a slab erected on one of his favourite walks in the village as a memorial, and the following lines from it may be quoted:—
“cintra, amena estancia,
throno da vegetante primavera:
quem te n?o ama, quem em teu rega?o
uma hora da vida lhe ha corrido,
essa hora esquecerá?”
“ah! cintra, blest abode,
the throne of budding spring,
who loves thee not: and who
can e’er forget in life
an hour passed in thy lap?”
when the stronghold on the crest of the mountain was securely held by the moslem soldiery, before the great affonso henriques swept southward with the cross victorious, the moorish kings of lisbon lived in silken ease below in their summer alcazar in the pra?a of cintra—a building this full of interest still, though injudicious or inexperienced travellers have caused no 222little disappointment by comparing it unjustifiably with the splendid arab remains at seville, granada, and toledo. truth to say, the palace at cintra is no alhambra, and should not be approached with expectations of anything of the sort. and yet the place is very quaint and charming as you enter the courtyard from the pra?a, hard by the manueline cross with its spiral shaft. the front of the palace appears to be purely manueline, the elaborate window and door decoration, consisting of twisted cables and intertwined branches, and even the pillars, spouts, and gargoyles are all redolent of portugal’s age of heroic expansion and wealth under the “fortunate” king.
it was a regal christian palace long before his time; for his great-grandfather, john the great and his wife philippa of lancaster, had adapted the moorish alcazar for their summer residence and made it their favourite palace, their grandson and successor affonso being born here. but it was in the palmy times of dom manuel that the palace of cintra became the centre of culture, wit, and poetry, where gaily-clad courtiers listened to the wondrous tales of portuguese explorers returned from africa and the indies, and poets 223sang the national epics telling of the opening of the mystic east with its wealth untold to portuguese commerce and dominion.
though the outside of the palace is portuguese manueline, the interior exhibits at every step portions of the original moorish edifice unaltered. the vast kitchen, with its enormous champagne-bottle chimneys in the centre, has never ceased to be available for culinary uses from the time of the arab kings until to-day; whilst the dining-room is pure moorish, lined with beautiful arab tiles. arab tiles, indeed, remain in many rooms, and the chancel of the chapel, once of course a mosque, is exquisitely paved with them. there is a beautiful little moorish patio too, with its marble fountain and laurels, that might be a portion of a palace at fez or mequinez now, so pure and intact is it. the older rooms of the palace generally are dark, for the moorish architects shut out the sun wherever possible, and the up and down floors on all sorts of queer levels impress upon one the immense antiquity of the place as a dwelling-house.
the finest rooms are the hall of magpies, the hall of swans, and the hall of stags. the 224first-named is a square apartment with beautiful moorish tiles, and a coved ceiling covered with paintings of magpies, each one with a motto issuing from its mouth saying, por bem, “with good intent.” the legend told is that queen philippa one day surprised john the great, who was a gallant lover, kissing a maid of honour and offering her a rose. the plantagenet queen had a temper of her own, which john probably feared more than the castilian charge up the slope of aljubarrota, and the king in exculpation cried to his wife, “por bem”; as who should say, honi soit qui mal y pense. the reputation of john was such that his excuse passed from mouth to mouth derisively, the queen’s sycophantic maids repeating it with such significant emphasis, and so frequently, that the king to shame them adopted “por bem” as his motto, and had his reception hall at cintra painted with the chattering birds repeating it.
manueline windows in the old palace, cintra
another fine moorish hall is called the hall of swans, of which the ceiling is painted with those birds, in memory of a pair of them kept in the patio below, and given to king manuel by his brother-in-law, charles v., as a very great rarity. another large apartment, with a conical roof, was 225constructed by king manuel himself, who gave to it the name of the hall of stags. here the king collected the armorial achievements of all the portuguese nobility. seventy-four stags are ranged around the room, each one having dependent from its neck the scutcheon of a noble family—except one, that of tavora, which the great minister pombal, in the eighteenth century, ordered to be erased—whilst upon a frieze running round the hall is the following verse:—
“pois com esfor?os e leaes
servicios, foram ganhados,
com estes e outros taes
devem ser conservados.”
“by prowess stout and loyal fame
these honours bright were gained;
by others like or eke the same
they needs must be retained.”
the small and plain hall of audience or justice has at the end a seat of tiled brick upon which the sovereigns sat, and here tradition says the council met, summoned by the rash young king sebastian in 1578, to sanction the crusading attack upon morocco upon which he had set his heart. all his fiery zeal and imperiousness were needed to persuade his nobles to agree to an adventure from which many foresaw disaster. 226but the ambitious youth had his way, and his mysterious fate, never solved when he disappeared for ever from the eyes of men at the battle of alcacer kebir, ended the male line of the house of avis which john i. had begun at aljubarrota two hundred years before. in this gloomy chamber the die was cast, and with the loss of sebastian his uncle philip ii. and his descendants became kings of portugal for a century.
a more modern tragedy was enacted within these ancient walls. the vicious young debauchee, affonso vi., was deprived of his crown and his wife by his brother dom pedro, in 1667; and here in the palace, in a room called after him, the wretched king passed the last twelve years of his imprisonment, shut off entirely from the sight of men. the windows of his prison-chamber still show the sockets wherein the strong bars were set, and a deep groove worn in the brick floor along one side marks the spot where the footsteps of the caged king, as he paced up and down for years before his bars, have worn his enduring epitaph. up in a little closely barred cell overlooking the choir of the chapel, where affonso used to hear mass, he died suddenly in 1683.
227the old palace of cintra, indeed, is full of memories, a place to linger in and about, rather than to rush through at the tail of a guide; although it must be confessed that the guardian in this case does take an intelligent interest in the objects under his care. cintra, in short, is beautiful beyond compare in certain directions; but, as happens in most frequented show-places, the chief beauties can only be enjoyed by the permission of others, and by the use of a silver key. the beautiful villa-gardens are jealously shut in by high walls and forbidden by gates marked private; the palace of the penha, a royal residence, is approached with bated breath and whispering humbleness, and the palace in the town, though not now inhabited by royalty, is still only shown on special application. but there is one thing in cintra that may be enjoyed freely and uncontrolled by all, the finest thing that cintra can show, the view from the town of that stupendous moorish fortress on its precipitous height. in sylvan beauty, in sweetness and freshness of atmosphere, even in its sublime prospects of mountain, vale, and sea, bussaco may rival and, in some respects, surpass it; but the long-stretched yellow battlements and massive 228towers piled upon the eternal granite boulders, sheer up a thousand feet and more over the little pleasure-town and its leafy ravines, would be worth the voyage to portugal alone to see, even though the gardens of the rich were more reserved and exclusive than they are.
2. byron thus speaks of this climb up the hill of cintra:—
“then slowly climb the many winding way,
and frequent turn to linger as you go,
from loftier rocks new loveliness survey,
and rest ye at our lady’s house of woe.”
this last epithet for the monastery, which is now the royal palace, is an error arising from a misunderstanding, which byron shares with many other people to the present day. the original name of the venerated image of the virgin, after which the monastery was named, is “nossa senhora da penha,” “our lady of the rock.” for some reason the place is still often referred to as the “pena,” which means “sorrow,” and the saint becomes “our lady of woe,” as byron called it.
3. two german ecclesiastics, who in 1450 were sent to lisbon by the emperor frederick iii. to ask for the hand of the portuguese infanta leonor, thus mention cintra in the narrative of their voyage: “oh! cintra, most pleasant place and royal garden, with a little river in which there are good trout. here, too, there are devout brethren in a jeronomite monastery, who live according to their rule.”—historia desponsationis frederici iii. cum eleanora lusitanica.
4. when byron visited cintra in 1809, beckford, whose fame as an author rests upon his curious eastern tale of “vathek,” had left his villa at monserrate for the more pretentious splendours of fonthill, and the peninsular war was pending.
“and yonder towers the prince’s palace fair;
there thou, too, vathek, england’s wealthiest son,
once formed thy paradise, as not aware,
when wanton wealth her mightiest deeds hath done,
meek peace voluptuous lures was ever wont to shun.
here didst thou dwell, here schemes of pleasure plan,
beneath yon mountain’s ever beauteous brow;
but now, as if a thing unblest by man,
thy fairy dwelling is as lone as thou.”
