GENERAL VIEW OF THE EXTERIOR OF THE CATHEDRAL.
as their riders, and beautiful as the señoritas, who gaze upon them with their big, black, lustrous eyes.
The streets of Seville, in comparison with those of Toledo or Córdova, are almost modern and relatively spacious. The most interesting of them all is the Calle de Sierpes, which no wagon is allowed to enter, and which is lined with cafés, clubhouses, and splendid shops. Many of the latter are semi-Moorish, and although you do not see a turbanned Mohammedan squatting in a small booth open to the street, you do see no end of shops which are practically in the street, the whole front wall (consisting of doors) being removed in the daytime. I have wandered for hours through the dazzling white streets, sniffing the diffused odour of oranges, and watching the handsome and picturesque peasantry as they revel through life. To the Englishman, no city in Spain presents more novel sights and historic contrasts. Having been successively a Phœnician, Greek, Roman, Gothic, Moorish, and Catholic city, it preserves traces and monuments of almost all these dynasties. At the suberb, Italica, the birthplace of three Roman emperors, the ruins of an ancient amphitheatre, with its various subterranean divisions for the gladiators and the wild beasts that appeared therein, may still be seen. Seville itself is Moorish in the arrangement of the streets and houses, and the Alcázar is the best preserved specimen of Moorish architecture in Spain. Adjoining it is the Christian Cathedral. In the streets the mediæval donkey grazes the modern tram-car. At the hotel sits an Englishman in a Moorish patio reading the latest number of the Times.
These Moorish patios are, of all the sights in Seville, the most interesting. One finds them at Malaga and Granada, at Córdova and Toledo, but one must come to Seville to see these pleasant courtyards at their best. Here are patios of all sizes and grades of splendour, but always patios. In the finest of these square courtyards the floor is of marble, and the walls are inlaid with elegant mosaic. In the centre is a flower plot, or a fountain surrounded with flowers or statuary. Marble columns on each side support the inside projection of the upper story, which is sometimes provided with windows, while the patio itself is open above to the sky at night, and covered during the daytime with an awning. To me these sweet shady spots were a source of increasing delight. Anything more exquisite after its kind—more perfectly ordered, delicately arranged, and beautifully kept up, than the court of a Sevillian gentleman’s residence, I have never seen; and the poorer classes follow suit with marvellous success and unanimity. There is no great outer door, as at Toledo, but cunningly-wrought and fairy-like iron gates, which only serve to set off an enticing picture of marble pavement, colonnade, and fountain, in a framing of palmitos, bananas, and lemon-trees, with here and there a coquettishly-perched cage of singing birds. The temptation to pry into these dainty interiors was irresistible.
GIRLS’ COURT IN THE ALCÁZAR, SEVILLE.
I confess that I had been two days in Seville before I explored the cathedral. For one thing, there was so much to see all around that I had no temptation to make a definite excursion to any particular point of interest; and as somebody once remarked about a five-act tragedy, it was so easy not to go to the cathedral. Moreover, I had seen cathedrals in every town
