I have already mentioned the great Alcazar, and the old town walls and gateways. They are magnificent in their scale, and very picturesque. The Alcazar was burnt some two or three years ago, and is now roofless, and I was told that its interior had been completely destroyed. I foolishly omitted to verify this statement by personal inspection, and contented myself with the sight of the exterior. The walls of the front towards the city are all diapered in plaster, and here and there about the town several other examples of the same kind of work are to be seen. The patterns are generally tracery patterns of the latest Gothic, repeated over and over again, so as to produce a regular diaper throughout. I presume that it was executed with a frame cut out to the required pattern, so as to allow of the ground being cut back slightly, leaving the pattern lines formed in the original face of the plaster. This kind of decoration seems to be perfectly legitimate, and here, owing to the care with which the plaster has been made and used, it has stood remarkably well, though most of the patterns that I saw had evidently been executed in the fifteenth century.

In the front of the Alcazar these plaster patterns are carried not only all over the plain face of the walls, but also round the towers and turrets at the angles, so that the very smallest possible amount of wrought stone is introduced. The great tower or keep standing back a few feet only from the front is similarly ornamented, but has stone quoins bonded irregularly into the walls; in its upper stage it has windows surmounted by quaint stone canopies, and then a series of great circular turrets, corbelled boldly out from the face of the wall, and carried up a considerable height, give its extremely marked and Spanish air to this grand tower. These turrets are of stone, and between them is a parapet boldly corbelled out on machicoulis from the walls. With that contempt for uniformity which marks mediæval artists, the keep is more than twice as broad on one side as on the other, and the great mass of wall and turret, roofs and spirelets, which crowned the whole building before the fire, well sustained its picturesque irregularity of shape.

The front of a private house near the walls, not far from San Esteban, is another capital example of the same kind of plaster-work. Here the façade is a perfectly smooth and unbroken surface, pierced for doors and windows, which are set in square panels of stone, and with a regular and straight line of stone quoining at the angles. At one end a low tower is carried up a few feet above the general line of the building. The windows are generally mere plain square openings; but two set side by side in the principal stage have delicate ajimez windows of two lights, with elaborately traceried heads. The patterns in the plaster are three in number: the first carried from the stone plinth up to the sills of the principal windows, where it is cut by a narrow band of ornament, acting as a stringcourse to divide it from the second pattern, which is carried up to the eaves, the tower being covered with a third diaper, rather less intricate than the others.

Near this house is a tower in the walls even more worthy of notice. It is of very considerable height, quite plain in outline, and pierced with only one or two square-headed windows, but surmounted by a fine parapet supported on machicoulis. The whole tower is built with bold stone quoins and horizontal bands of brickwork, each band two courses in height, at intervals of about three feet. Between these bands the walls are plastered and diapered. Here, as in the other house, only two or three patterns are used, but I think great judgment is shown in the repetition for the greater part of the height of the same pattern, which is changed at last near the top, where it was desirable to emphasize the work. Most men having three patterns to use would have divided them equally, but the real artist gives all their value to his simple materials by not doing so. The construction of this tower led naturally to its decoration. The wrought stone at the angles, the rough stonework of the walls, and the occasional bonding-courses of brick, were all used simply as the best materials for their respective parts; and the rough stonework being plastered and diapered, gave a richness and polish to the whole work which it would otherwise have wanted, whilst it in no degree destroyed the air of stability of the wall, which is secured by the obviously constructional arrangement of the stone and brick.

The Moors were always distinguished by the beautiful use they made of plaster; and whether or no these Segovian buildings were executed by Moorish architects, it is quite certain that at any rate we owe them to their influence and example. The patterns used are generally such as in stone-work would be unhesitatingly attributed to the end of the fifteenth or first half of the sixteenth century, and to this period no doubt the works I have been describing belong. They deserve a detailed notice because they prove, as do most Moorish works, that plaster may be used truthfully and artistically, and that without any approach to the contemptible effect which the imbecility and dishonesty of the nineteenth-century designers of plaster-work have contrived to impress on almost all their productions.

My last work in Segovia was to go to the Alcazar to get a sketch of the town, with the cathedral rising in a noble mass in its very centre, backed by the line of the Guadarrama mountains, looking black and angry with the storm-clouds which swept over the sky and around their summits at sunset; and then strolling quietly back into the town, I went into the cathedral, to be impressed, as one always must be in such a place, by the aweful solemnity which even the latest Gothic architects in Spain knew how to impart to their buildings.

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CHAPTER X.
MADRID—ALCALÁ—GUADALAJARA—SIGÜENZA.

ON my first journey to Madrid I travelled most of the way from Valladolid by diligence, and though the way was long and weary, the passage of the Sierra de Guadarrama was very fine, and I remember few pictures more lovely than that which we saw at sunrise, as we climbed the northern side of the mountains amid groups of stone-pines; whilst the steep descent to the village of Guadarrama, on the south, with a slight distant view of Madrid, and a near view of the Escorial, was quite a thing to be remembered with pleasure. Now, however, instead of arriving at Madrid hot, dusty, and sore with a diligence journey, the railway is completed, and the line of country it takes is so beautiful between Avila and Madrid as to leave no room for regrets for the old passage of the mountains by road.