The Supreme Interest Of The Cathedral Is, Of Course, The Royal Chapel,
Where In A Sunken Level Ferdinand And Isabel Lie, With Their Poor Mad
Daughter Joan And Her Idolized Unfaithful Husband Philip The Fair, Whose
Body She Bore About With Her While She Lived.
The picture postal has
these monuments in its keeping and can show them better than my pen,
which falters also from the tremendous _retablo_ of the chapel dense
with the agonies of martyrdom and serene with the piety of the Catholic
Kings kneeling placidly amid the horrors.
If the picture postal will not
supply these, or reproduce the many and many relics and memorials which
abound .there and in the sacristy - jewels and vestments and banners and
draperies of the royal camp-altar - there is nothing for the reader but
to go himself and see. It is richly worth his while, and if he cannot
believe in a box which will be shown him as the box Isabel gave Columbus
her jewels in merely because he has been shown a reliquary as her
hand-glass, so much the worse for him. He will not then merit the
company of a small choir-boy who efficiently opens the iron gate to the
crypt and gives the custodian as good as he sends in back-talk and
defiantly pockets the coppers he has earned. Much less will he deserve
to witness the homely scene in an area outside of the Royal Chapel,
where many milch goats are assembled, and when a customer comes,
preferably a little girl with a tin cup, one of the mothers of the flock
is pinioned much against her will by a street boy volunteering for the
office, and her head held tight while the goatherdess milks the measure
full at the other end.
IX
Everywhere about the cathedral beggars lay in wait, and the neighboring
streets were lively with bargains of prickly pears spread open on the
ground by old women who did not care whether any one bought or not.
There were also bargains in palmistry; and at one place a delightful
humorist was selling clothing at auction. He allured the bidders by
having his left hand dressed as a puppet and holding a sparkling
dialogue with it; when it did not respond to his liking he beat it with
his right hand, and every now and then he rang a little bell. He had a
pleased crowd about him in the sunny square; but it seemed to me that
all the newer part of Granada was lively with commerce in ample,
tram-trodden streets which gave the shops, larger than any we had seen
out of Madrid, a chance uncommon in the narrow ways of other Spanish
cities. Yet when I went to get money on my letter of credit, I found the
bank withdrawn from the modernity in a seclusion reached through a
lovely _patio._ We were seated in old-fashioned welcome, such as used
to honor a banker's customers in Venice, and all comers bowed and bade
us good day. The bankers had no such question of the different
signatures as vexed those of Valladolid, and after no more delay than
due ceremony demanded, I went away with both my money and my letter,
courteously seen to the door.
The guide, to whom we had fallen in the absence of our French-speaking
guide of the day before, spoke a little English, and he seemed to grow
in sympathetic intelligence as the morning passed. He made our
sightseeing include visits to the church of St. John of God, and the
church of San Geronimo, which was built by Gonsalvo de Cordova, the
Great Captain, and remains now a memorial to him. We rang at the door,
and after long delay a woman came and let us into an interior stranger
ever than her being there as custodian. It was frescoed from floor to
ceiling everywhere, except the places of the altars now kept by the
painted _retablos_ and the tombs and the statues of the various saints
and heroes. The _retablo_ of the high altar is almost more beautiful
than wonderful, but the chief glory of the place is in the kneeling
figures of the Great Captain and his wife, one on either side of the
altar, and farther away the effigies of his famous oompanions-in-arms,
and on the walls above their heraldic blazons and his. The church Was
unfinished when the Great Captain died in the displeasure of his
ungrateful king, and its sumptuous completion testifies to the devotion
of his wife and her taste in choosing the best artists for the work.
I have still the sense of a noonday quiet that lingered with us after we
left this church and which seemed to go with us to the Hospital of St.
John of God, founded, with other hospitals, by the pious Portuguese,
who, after a life of good works, took this name on his well-merited
canonization. The hospital is the monument of his devotion to good
works, and is full of every manner of religious curio. I cannot remember
to have seen so many relics under one roof, bones of both holy men and
women, with idols of the heathen brought from Portuguese possessions in
the East which are now faded from the map, as well as the body of St.
John of God shrined in silver in the midst of all.
I do not know why I should have brought away from these two places a
peacefulness of mind such as seldom follows a visit to show-places, but
the fact is so; perhaps it was because we drove to and from them, and
were not so tired as footworn sight-seers are, or so rebellious. One who
had seen not only the body of St. John of God, but his cane with a
whistle in it to warn the charitable of his coming and attune their
minds to alms-giving, and the straw basket in which he collected food
for the poor, now preserved under an embroidered satin covering, and an
autograph letter of his framed in glass and silver, might even have been
refreshed by his experience.
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