“And on the Sierra swung the Convent bells.”
San Bartolomeo.
“The stabled charger bids the monk retire.”
Sir Thomas More commemorates the housing of cattle in churches. “They stop the course of agriculture, reserving only the churches, that they may lodge their sheep in them.” (Utopia, book i.) Bayle has a similar story in his Dictionary of an abbot who converted his church into a stable, an example which was speedily followed by revolutionary France. During the French invasion of Portugal the cavalry were frequently quartered in churches, and during the Miguelite war in that country I have been assured that the same thing was witnessed more than once, and I know of a Constitutionalist, at present a dignified, clergyman, who upon its being found that the priest was absent upon some Saint’s festival, stept forward himself and said mass for the assembled soldiers, booted and spurred as he was and in dragoon regimentals! I have often seen this pious gentleman in Lisbon, whom the populace declare to have taken from an image of the Virgin the ring which he now sports upon his finger!
XII. “Olia’s side.”
The batteries of Monte Olia commanded the Castle at a distance of 1,600 yards, from the north side of the Urumea, Olia and Orgullo buttressing the entrance of the river magnificently on either side, and standing apart like giant ramparts.
“The Mirador.”
A battery on the eastern side of Monte Orgullo. The name signifies “a look out,” the use to which it was formerly applied. It reminded me very much of the Signal House at Gibraltar, only that I missed those sapphire and chrysolite tints of the Mediterranean, which struck me so much when I saw the moon rise from that elevated ground under the auspices of the stalwart Sergeant MacDonald.
XIII. “And totter to their base Tirynthian walls.”
—Τίρυνθά τε τειχιόεσσαν.—Hom. Il. ii. 559.