its Arabic decorativeness in tinted stucco is the palace
begun by Charles V., after a design in the spirit
of the supreme hour of the Italian Renaissance.
It is not a ruin in its long arrest, and one hears
with hopeful sympathy that the Spanish king means some
day to complete it. To be sure, the world is,
perhaps, already full enough of royal palaces, but
since they return sooner or later to the people whose
pockets they come out of, one must be willing to have
this palace completed as the architect imagined it.
We were followed into the Moorish palace by the music
of three blind minstrels who began to tune their guitars
as soon as they felt us: see us they could not.
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. Elevating his voice of a sudden, he
told the infidel he lied, and raising his arm at the
same time he smote him on the head with his sheathed
sword. In an instant the Court of Lions glistened
with the flash of arms,” insomuch that the American
lady whom we saw writing a letter beside a friend
sketching there must have been startled from her opening
words, “I am sitting here with my portfolio
on my knees in the beautiful Court of the Lions,”
and if Muley Aben Hassan had not “overheard the
tumult and forbade all appeal to force, pronouncing
the person of the ambassador sacred,” she never
could have gone on.
Copyrights
Familiar Spanish Travels from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
