Then presently we were in the famous Court of the
Lions, where a group of those beasts, at once archaic and puerile in
conception, sustained the basin of a fountain in the midst of a graveled
court arabesqued and honeycombed round with the wonted ornamentation of
the Moors.
The place was disappointing to the boy in me who had once passed so much
of his leisure there, and had made it all marble and gold. The floor is
not only gravel, and the lions are not only more like sheep, but the
environing architecture and decoration are of a faded prettiness which
cannot bear comparison with the fresh rougeing, equally Moorish, of the
Alcazar at Seville. Was this indeed the place where the Abencerrages
were brought in from supper one by one and beheaded into the fountain at
the behest of their royal host? Was it here that the haughty Don Juan de
Vera, coming to demand for the Catholic kings the arrears of tribute due
them from the Moor, "paused to regard its celebrated fountain" and "fell
into discourse with the Moorish courtiers on certain mysteries of the
Christian faith"? So Washington Irving says, and so I once believed,
with glowing heart and throbbing brow as I read how "this most Christian
knight and discreet ambassador restrained himself within the limits of
lofty gravity, leaning on the pommel of his sword and looking down with
ineffable scorn upon the weak casuists around him. The quick and subtle
Arabian witlings redoubled their light attacks on the stately Spaniard,
but when one of them, of the race of the Abencerrages dared to question,
with a sneer, the immaculate conception of the blessed Virgin, the
Catholic knight could no longer restrain his ire.
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