Every One
Will Have His Feeling About Moorish Architecture; Mine Is That A Little
Goes A Great Way, And That It Is Too Monotonous To Compete With The
Gothic In Variety, While It Lacks The Dignity Of Any Form Of The Greek
Or The Renaissance.
If the phrase did not insult the sex which the faith
of the Moslem insufferably insults, one might sum up one's slight for it
in the word effeminate.
The Alcazar gardens are the best of the Alcazar. But I would not ignore
the homelike charm of the vast court by which you enter from the street
outside to the palace beyond. It is planted casually about with rather
shabby orange trees that children were playing under, and was decorated
with the week's wash of the low, simple dwellings which may be hired at
a rental moderate even for Seville, where a handsome and commodious
house in a good quarter rents for sixty dollars a year. One of those
two-story cottages, as we should call them, in the ante-court of the
Alcazar had for the student of Spanish life the special advantage of a
lover close to a ground-floor window dropping tender nothings down
through the slats of the shutter to some maiden lurking within. The
nothings were so tender that you could not hear them drop, and, besides,
they were Spanish nothings, and it would not have served any purpose for
the stranger to listen for them. Once afterward we saw the national
courtship going on at another casement, but that was at night, and here
the precious first sight of it was offered at ten o'clock in the
morning.
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