I know not how to describe ancient buildings.  I am no architect; but things which are stately always strike me deeply; and there is no doubt about it, Batalha is stately, simple, severe, with that religious stamp about it which I look for vainly in the churches of our own day.  The doorway, delicately carved, and in beautiful preservation, represents terrestrial paradise, and every one of the statues of the saints is a little masterpiece.  Behind the church there is a chapel begun by Don Emmanuel, and which he was never able to finish.  This is much to be regretted, to judge by what already exists.  There is some sculpture of the most extraordinary delicacy—­almost like a spider’s web.  But, alas! vandals have come upon the scene.  The stained glass has gone, and ever so many statuettes are missing from their niches, sold to collectors or to passing tourists.  Close to the church stands the convent, similar in style to the convent at Belem.  There is one huge Gothic hall, which I thought superb.  The story goes that the vaulted ceiling gave way three times, and that when it had been built up again the fourth time the architect stood himself underneath it just as the last scaffolding was knocked away.  The vault stood, and he had his own face carved on one of the pendentives, thus forming a statuette which is by no means one of the least beautiful in that splendid building, all the more to be admired, to my thinking, on account of its being absolutely untouched by the barbarous hand of the restorer.

We went on to Leiria, where a great market gave us an opportunity of admiring the beauty of the country women and their charming costumes.  We put up in a posada, in which the stable was on the first floor and the kitchen on the second, and where we shared rooms with geese and pigs and a party of travelling gelders from France.  After Leiria came Pombal.  These little Portuguese towns are all charming.  They seem as if they belonged to another period altogether.  The pillory is still to be seen in them, and the gaol too; this last a sort of wild beast cage, with a huge grated window level with the public square, through which every one can talk, without any surveillance, with the prisoners, condemned or otherwise, who are all huddled together pell mell.  There were only two young women in the gaol at Pombal.  We entered into conversation with them.  By dint of questioning them, and the passers-by as well, we learnt that they were sisters—­and then came the eternal old tale.  The eldest had a lover, and all the rest of it!  She had not courage to put the child out of the way, and her young sister buried it alive.  The unhappy girls had been five months in that cage waiting their sentence, exposed to all the insults, jests, and coarse remarks of the populace.  What torture to those poor women, who, to judge by their features and appearance, were evidently of a superior class to the mere peasants!  The elder one, the mother, was very beautiful, though pale and seemingly weakened by suffering.  Her expression was so gentle it pained me to look at her.  “Ah, let no man insult a woman who has fallen,” says the poet.