Habitually We
Entered By That Gate Of Pardon Which In Former Times Had Opened The
Sanctuary To Any Wickedness Short
Of heresy; but, as our need of refuge
was not pressing, we wearied of the Gate of Pardon, with its
Beautiful
Saracenic arch converted to Christianity by the Renaissance bas-relief
obliterating the texts from the Koran. We tried to form the habit of
going in by other gates, but the Gate of Pardon finally prevailed; there
was always a gantlet of cabmen to be run beside it, which brought our
sins home to us. It led into the badly paved Court of Oranges, where the
trees seem planted haphazard and where there used also to be fountains.
Gate and court are remnants of the mosque, patterned upon that of
Cordova by one of the proud Moorish kings of Seville, and burned by the
Normans when they took and sacked his city. His mosque had displaced the
early Christian basilica of San Vicente, which the still earlier temple
to Venus Salambo had become. Then, after the mosque was rebuilt, the
good San Fernando in his turn equipped it with a Gothic choir and
chapels and turned it into the cathedral, which was worn out with pious
uses when the present edifice was founded, in their _folie des
grandeurs,_ by those glorious madmen in the first year of the fifteenth
century.
IV
Little of this learning troubled me in my visits to the cathedral, or
even the fact that, next to St. Peter's, it was the largest church in
the world.
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