The Puertas del Carbon and del Aceite are worthy of a visit. On the Puerta de Jeres is the following inscription:
Hercules me edifico,
Julio Cesar me coesco,
De Muros y torres altas
El rey santo me gano
Con Garci Perez de Vargas.
Seville is surrounded by a continuous line of embattlemented walls, flanked at intervals by large towers, many of which are at present in ruins, and also by ditches, almost entirely choked up. These walls, which would not afford the least protection against modern artillery, produce, with their denticulated Arabic embrasures, a very picturesque effect. They are said to have been begun, like all other walls and camps that ever existed, by Julius Cæsar.
In an open square, near the Puerta de Triana, I beheld rather a singular sight, consisting of a family of gipsies encamped in the open air, and composing a group that would have sent Callop into ecstasies. Three stakes, in the form of a triangle, made a kind of rustic hook, which supported over a large fire, scattered by the wind into tongues of flame and spirals of smoke, a saucepan full of strange and suspicious ingredients, like those which Goya knows so well how to cast into the caldrons of the witches of Barahona. By this apology for a fireplace was seated a bronzed, copper-coloured gitana, with a curved profile, naked to her waist,—a fact which proved her to be completely devoid of anything like coquetry: her long, black hair fell, like a quantity of brushwood, down her thin, yellow back, and over her bistre forehead. Through the dishevelled locks sparkled a pair of those large oriental eyes, of mother-of-pearl and jet, which are so mysterious and contemplative that they elevate into poetry the most degraded and brutal physiognomy. Around her sprawled two or three screeching children, as black as mulattoes, with large bellies and shrunk limbs, which made them look more like quadrumans than bipeds. I do not think that little Hottentots could be more hideous or more dirty. This state of nakedness is nothing uncommon, and shocks nobody. You often meet beggars, whose only covering consists of a piece of old counterpane, or a fragment of very equivocal drawers; I have seen, wandering about the public squares of Granada and Malaga, young rascals of twelve or fourteen years of age, with less clothing on them than Adam had when he left Paradise. The Triana suburbs are particularly frequented by individuals in this costume, for they contain a great number of gitanos, whose opinions with regard to a free and easy style of dress are very advanced; the women pass their time frying different articles of food in the open air, and the men employ themselves in smuggling, clipping mules, horse-jobbing, and the like, when they are doing nothing worse.
The Cristina, the Alameda del Duque, Italica, and the Moorish Alcazar, are, no doubt, all very curious; but the true marvel of Seville is its Cathedral, which is a surprising edifice, even when compared to the Cathedrals of Burgos and Toledo, and the Mosque at Cordova. The chapter who ordered it to be erected, summed up their plans in this one phrase: "Let us raise a monument which shall cause Posterity to think we must have been mad." This was, at any rate, a good, broad, sensible way of settling matters, and the consequence was, that the artists, having full scope for the exertion of their talents, worked wonders, while the canons, in order to accelerate the completion of the edifice, gave up all their incomes, only reserving what was barely sufficient to enable them to live. O thrice-sainted canons! may you slumber softly under the shade of your sepulchral flags near your beloved Cathedral!
The most extravagant and most monstrously prodigious Hindoo pagodas are not to be mentioned in the same century as the Cathedral of Seville. It is a mountain scooped out, a valley turned topsy-turvy; Notre Dame at Paris might walk about erect in the middle nave, which is of a frightful height; pillars, as large round as towers, and which appear so slender that they make you shudder, rise out of the ground or descend from the vaulted roof, like the stalactites in a giant's grotto. The four lateral naves, although less high, would each cover a church, steeple included. The retablo, or high altar, with its stairs, its architectural superpositions, and its rows of statues rising in stories one above the other, is in itself an immense edifice, and almost touches the roof. The Paschal taper is as tall as the mast of a ship, and weighs two thousand and fifty pounds. The bronze candlestick which contains it is a kind of column like that in the Place Vendôme; it is copied from the candlestick of the Temple at Jerusalem, as represented in the bas-reliefs on the Arch of Titus, and everything else is proportionally grand. Twenty thousand pounds of wax and as many pounds of oil are burnt in the cathedral annually, while the wine used in the service of the Sacrament amounts to the frightful quantity of eighteen thousand, seven hundred and fifty French litres. It is true that five hundred masses are said every day at the eighty altars! The catafalque used during the Holy Week, and which is called the monument, is nearly a hundred feet high! The gigantic organs resemble the basaltic colonnades of Fingal's Cave, and yet the tempests and thunder which escape from their pipes, which are as large in the bore as battering cannon, are like melodious murmurs, or the chirping of birds and seraphim under these colossal ogives. There are eighty-three stained glass windows, copied from the cartoons of Michael Angelo, Raphael, Dürer, Peregrino, Tibaldi, and Lucas Cambiaso; the oldest and most beautiful are those executed by Arnold de Flandre, a celebrated painter on glass. The most modern ones, which date from 1819, prove how greatly art has degenerated since the glorious sixteenth century, that climacteric epoch of the world, when the human plant brought forth its most beautiful flowers and its most savoury fruit. The choir, which is Gothic, is decorated with turrets, spires, niche-work, figures, and foliage, forming one immense and delicately minute piece of workmanship that actually confounds the mind, and cannot now-a-days be understood. You are actually struck dumb in the presence of such stupendous efforts of art, and you interrogate yourself with anxiety, as to whether vitality is withdrawing itself more and more, every century, from the world. This prodigy of talent, patience, and genius, has, at least, preserved the name of its author, on whom we are able to bestow our tribute of admiration. On one of the panels to the left of the altar the following inscription is traced: "Este coro fizo Nufro Sanchez entallador que Dios haya año de 1475." (Nufro Sanchez, sculptor, whom may God protect, made this choir in 1475.)