Italy; with sketches of Spain and Portugal Part 37

Roxas, most eager to enter upon his office of cicerone, fidgeted to the window, observed we had still an hour or two of daylight, and proposed an excursion to the palace and gardens of the Buen Retiro. Upon entering the court of the palace, which is surrounded by low buildings, with plastered fronts, sadly battered by wind and weather, I espied some venerable figures in caftans and turbans, leaning against a doorway.

My sparks of orientalism instantly burst into a flame at such a sight: "Who are those picturesque animals?" said I to our conductor. "Is it lawful to approach them?" "As often as you please," answered Roxas.

"They belong to the Turkish amba.s.sador, who is lodged, with all his train, at the Buen Retiro, in the identical apartments once occupied by Farinelli; where he held his state levees and opera rehearsals; drilling ministers one day, and tenors and soprani the other: if you have a mind, we will go up-stairs and examine the whole menagerie."

No sooner said, no sooner done. I cleared four steps at a leap, to the great delight of his sublime excellency's pages and attendants, and entered a saloon spread with the most sumptuous carpets, and perfumed with the fragrance of the wood of aloes. In a corner of this magnificent chamber sat the amba.s.sador, Achmet Va.s.sif Effendi, wrapped up in a pelisse of the most precious sables, playing with a light cane he had in his hand, and every now and then pa.s.sing it under the noses of some tall, handsome slaves, who were standing in a row before him. These figures, fixed as statues, and to all appearance equally insensible, neither moved hand nor eye. As I advanced to make my salam to the grand seignor's representative, who received me with a most gracious nod of the head; his interpreter announced to what nation I belonged, and my own individual warm partiality for the Sublime Porte.

As soon as I had taken my seat in a ponderous fauteuil of figured velvet, coffee was carried round in cups of most delicate china, with gold enamelled saucers. Notwithstanding my predilection for the east and its customs, I could hardly get this beverage down, it was so thick and bitter; whilst I was making a few wry faces in consequence, a low murmuring sound, like that of flutes and dulcimers, accompanied by a sort of tabor, issued from behind a curtain which separated us from another apartment. There was a melancholy wildness in the melody, and a continual repet.i.tion of the same plaintive cadences, that soothed and affected me.

The amba.s.sador kept poring upon my countenance, and appeared much delighted with the effect his music seemed to produce upon it. He is a man of considerable talent, deeply skilled in Turkish literature; a native of Bagdad; rich, munificent, and n.o.bly born, being descended from the house of Barmek; gracious in his address, smooth and plausible in his elocution; but not without something like a spark of despotism in a corner of his eye. Now and then I fancied that the recollection of having recommended the bow-string, and certain doubts whether he might not one day or other be complimented with it in his turn, pa.s.sed across his venerable and interesting physiognomy.

My eager questions about Bagdad, the tomb of Zobeida, the vestiges of the Dhar al Khalifat, or palace of the Abba.s.sides, seemed to excite a thousand remembrances which gave him pleasure; and when I added a few quotations from some of his favourite authors, particularly Mesihi, he became so flowingly communicative, that a shrewd dapper Greek, called Timoni, who acted as his most confidential interpreter, could hardly keep pace with him.

Had not the hour of prayer arrived, our conversation might have lasted till midnight. Rising up with much stateliness, he extended his arms to bid me a good evening, and was a.s.sisted along by two good-looking Georgian pages, to an adjoining chamber, where his secretaries, dragoman, and attendants, were all a.s.sembled to perform their devotions, each on his little carpet, as if in a mosque; and it was not unedifying to witness the solemnity and abstractedness with which these devotions were performed.

LETTER IX.

The Museum and Academy of Arts.--Scene on the Prado.--The Portuguese Amba.s.sador and his comforters.--The Theatre.--A highly popular dancer.--Seguidillas in all their glory.

Sunday, Dec. 16th, 1787.

The kind, indefatigable Roxas came to conduct us to the Museum and Academy of Arts. It consists of seven or eight apartments, with cases all around them, in a plain, good style; the objects clearly arranged, and exposed to view in a very intelligible manner. There is a vast collection of minerals, corals, madrepores, and stalact.i.tes, from all the grottoes in the universe; and curious specimens of virgin-gold and silver. Amongst the latter, a lump weighing seventy pounds, which was s.h.i.+vered off an enormous ma.s.s by a master miner, who, after dining on it, with twelve or thirteen persons, hacked it to pieces, and distributed the fragments amongst his guests.

What pleased me most was a collection of Peruvian vases; a polished stone, which served the Incas for a mirror; and a linen mantle, which formerly adorned their copper-coloured shoulders, as finely woven as a shawl, and flowered in very nearly a similar manner, the colours as fresh and vivid as if new.

In the apartments of the academy is a most valuable collection of casts after the serene and graceful antique, and several fierce, obtrusive daubings by modern Spanish artists.

I found our acute, intelligent charge-d'affaires'[26] card lying on my table when I got home, and a great many more, of equal whiteness; such a sight chills me like a fall of snow, for I think of the cold idleness of going about day after day dropping little bits of pasteboard in return.

Verdeil and I dined tete-a-tete, planning schemes how to escape formal fussifications. No easy matter, I suspect, if I may judge from appearances.

Our repast and our council over, we hurried to the Prado, where a brilliant string of equipages was moving along in two files. In the middle paraded the state coaches of the royal family, containing their own precious selves, and their wonted accompaniment of bedchamber lords and ladies, duly bedizened. It was a gay spectacle; the music of the Swiss guards playing, and the evening sun s.h.i.+ning bright on their showy uniforms. The botanic garden is separated from the walk by magnificent railings and pilasters, placed at regular distances, crowned with vases of aloes and yuccas. The verdure and fountains of this vast enclosure, terminated by a range of columned conservatories, with an entrance of very majestic architecture, has a delightful and striking effect.

From the Prado I drove to the Portuguese amba.s.sador's, who is laid up with a sore toe. Three diplomatic animals, two males and one female, were nursing and comforting him. He is most supremely dull, and so are his comforters. One of them in particular, who shall be nameless, quite asinine.

The little sympathy I feel for creatures of this genus, made me shorten my visit as much as I decently could, and return home to take up Roxas, who was waiting to accompany us to the Spanish theatre. They were acting the Barber of Seville, with Paesiello's music, and singing better than at the opera. The entertainment ended with a sort of intermez, very characteristic of Spanish manners in low life; in which were introduced seguidillas. One of the dancers, a young fellow, smartly dressed as a maxo, so enraptured the audience, that they made him repeat his dance four times over; a French dancing-master would have absolutely shuddered at the manner in which he turned in his knees. The women sit by themselves in a gallery as dingy as limbo, wrapped up in their white mantillas, and looking like spectres. I never heard anything like the vociferation with which the pit called out for the seguidillas, nor the frantic, deafening applause they bestowed on their favourite dancer.

The play ended at eight, and we came back to tea by our fireside.

LETTER X.

Visit to the Escurial.--Imposing site of that regal convent.--Reception by the Mystagogue of the place.--Magnificence of the choir.--Charles the Fifth's organ.--Crucifix by Cellini.--Gorgeous ceiling painted by Luca Giordano.--Extent and intricacy of the stupendous edifice.

Thursday, Dec. 19th, 1787.

I hate being roused out of bed by candlelight on a sharp wintry morning; but as I had fixed to-day for visiting the Escurial, and had stationed three relays on the road, in order to perform the journey expeditiously, I thought myself obliged to carry my plan into execution.

The weather was cold and threatening, the sky red and deeply coloured.

Roxas was to be of our party, so we drove to his brother, the Marquis of Villanueva's, to take him up. He is one of the best-natured and most friendly of human beings, and I would not have gone without him upon any account; though in general I abhor turning and twisting about a town in search of any body, let its soul be never so transcendent.

It was past eight before we issued out of the gates of Madrid, and rattled along an avenue on the banks of the Mancanares full gallop, which brought us to the Casa del Campo, one of the king's palaces, wrapped up in groves and thickets. We continued a mile or two by the wall of this enclosure, and leaving La Sarsuela, another royal villa, surrounded by shrubby hillocks, on the right, traversed three or four leagues of a wild, naked country, and, after ascending several considerable eminences, the sun broke out, the clouds partially rolled away, and we discovered the white buildings of this far-famed monastery, with its dome and towers detaching themselves from the bold back-ground of a lofty, irregular mountain.

We were now about a league off: the country wore a better aspect than near Madrid. To the right and left of the road, which is of a n.o.ble width, and perfectly well made, lie extensive parks of greensward, scattered over with fragments of rock and stumps of oak and ash-trees.

Numerous herds of deer were standing stock-still, quietly lifting up their innocent noses, and looking us full in the face with their beautiful eyes, secure of remaining unmolested, for the King never permits a gun to be discharged in these enclosures.

The Escurial, though overhung by melancholy mountains, is placed itself on a very considerable eminence, up which we were full half an hour toiling, the late rains having washed this part of the road into utter confusion. There is something most severely impressive in the facade of this regal convent, which, like the palace of Persepolis, is overshadowed by the adjoining mountain; nor did I pa.s.s through a vaulted cloister into the court before the church, solid as if hewn out of a rock, without experiencing a sort of shudder, to which no doubt the vivid recollection of the black and blood-stained days of our gloomy queen Mary's husband not slightly contributed. The sun being again overcast, the porches of the church, surmounted by grim statues, appeared so dark and cavern-like, that I thought myself about to enter a subterraneous temple set apart for the service of some mysterious and terrible religion. And when I saw the high altar, in all its pomp of jasper-steps, ranks of columns one above the other, and paintings filling up every interstice, full before me, I felt completely awed.

The sides of the recess, in which this imposing pile is placed, are formed by lofty chapels, almost entirely occupied by catafalques of gilt enamelled bronze. Here, with their crowns and sceptres humbly prostrate at their feet, bare-headed and unhelmed, kneel the figures, large as life, of the Emperor Charles the Fifth, and his imperious son, the second Philip, accompanied by those of their unhappy consorts and ill-fated children. My sensations of dread and dreariness were not diminished upon finding myself alone in such company; for Roxas had left me to deliver some letters to his right reverence the prior, which were to open to us all the arcana of this terrific edifice, at once a temple, a palace, a convent, and a tomb.

Presently my amiable friend returned, and with him a tall old monk, with an ash-coloured forbidding countenance, and staring eyes, the expression of which was the farthest removed possible from anything like cordiality. This was the mystagogue of the place--the prior _in propria persona_, the representative of St. Jerome, as far as this monastery and its domain was concerned, and a disciplinarian of celebrated rigidness.

He began examining me from head to foot, and, after what I thought rather a strange scrutiny, asked me in broad Spanish what I wished particularly to see. Then turning to Roxas, said loud enough for me to hear him, "He is very young; does he understand what I say to him? But, as I am peremptorily commanded to show him about, I suppose I must comply, though I am quite unused to the office of explaining our curiosities. However, if it must be, it must; so let us begin, and not dally. I have no time to spare, you well know, and have quite enough to do in the choir and the convent."

After this not very gracious exordium, we set forth on our tour. First we visited some apartments with vaulted roofs, painted in arabesque, in the finest style of the sixteenth century; and then a vast hall, which had been used for the celebration of ma.s.s, whilst the great church was building, where I saw the Perla in all its purity, the most delicately-finished work of Raphael, the Pesce, with its divine angel, graceful infant; and devout young Tobit, breathing the very soul of pious, unaffected simplicity. My attention was next attracted by that most profoundly pathetic of pictures, Jacob weeping over the b.l.o.o.d.y garment of his son; the loftiest proof in existence of the extraordinary powers of Velasquez in the n.o.blest work of art.

These three pictures so absorbed my admiration, that I had little left for a host of glorious performances by t.i.tian and the highest masters, which cover the plain, ma.s.sive walls of these conventual rooms with a paradise of glowing colours; so I pa.s.sed along almost as rapidly as my grumbling cicerone could desire, and followed him up several flights of stairs, and through many and many an arched pa.s.sage and vestibule, all of the sternest doric, into the choir, which is placed over the grand western entrance, right opposite, at the distance of more than two hundred feet, to the high altar and its solemn accompaniments. No regal chamber I ever beheld can be compared, in point of sober harmonious majesty, to this apartment, which looks more as if it belonged to a palace than to a church. The series of stalls, designed in a severer taste than was common in the sixteenth century, are carved out of the most precious woods the Indies could furnish. At the extremity of this striking perspective of onyx-coloured seats, columns, and canopies, appears suspended upon a black velvet pall that revered image of the crucified Saviour, formed of the purest ivory, which Cellini seems to have sculptured in moments of devout rapture and inspiration. It is by far his finest work; his Perseus, at Florence, is tame and laboured in comparison.

In a long narrow corridor which runs behind the stalls, panelled all over like an inlaid cabinet, I was shown a beautiful little organ, in a richly chased silver case, which accompanied Charles the Fifth in his African expedition, and must often have gently beguiled the cares of empire, for he played on it, tradition says, almost every evening. That it is worth playing upon even now I can safely vouch, for I never touched any instrument with a tone of more delicious sweetness; and touch it I did, though my austere conductor, the sour-visaged prior, looked doubly forbidding on the occasion.

The stalls I have just mentioned are much less ornamented than those I have seen in Pavia, and many other monasteries; the ceiling of this n.o.blest of choirs, displays the utmost exuberance of decoration--the richest and most gorgeous of spectacles, the heavens and all the powers therein. Imagination can scarcely conceive the pomp and prodigality of pencil with which Luca Giordano has treated this subject, and filled every corner of the vast s.p.a.ce it covers with well-rounded forms, that seem actually starting from the glowing clouds with which they are environed.

"Is not this fine?" said the monk; "you can have nothing like it in your country. And now be pleased to move forward, for the day is wasting, and you will have little time left to examine our inestimable relics, and the jewelled shrines in which they are deposited."

We went down from the choir, I can scarcely tell whither, such is the extent and intricacy of this stupendous edifice. We pa.s.sed, I believe, through some of the lateral chapels at the great church, into several quadrangles, one in particular, with a fountain under a cupola in the centre, surrounded by doric arcades, equal in justness of proportion and architectural terseness to Palladio's court in the convent of S. Giorgio Maggiore.

LETTER XI.

Mysterious cabinets.--Relics of Martyrs.--A feather from the Archangel Gabriel's wing.--Labyrinth of gloomy cloisters.--Sepulchral cave.--River of death.--The regal sarcophagi.

My lord the prior, not favouring a prolonged survey, I reluctantly left this beautiful court, and was led into a low gallery, roofed and wainscoted with cedar, lined on both sides by ranges of small doors of different-coloured Brazil-wood, looking in appearance, at least, as solid as marble. Four sacristans, and as many lay-brothers, with large lighted flambeaux of yellow wax in their hands, and who, by the by, never quitted us more the remainder of our peregrinations, stood silent as death, ready to unlock those mysterious entrances.

The first they opened exhibited a buffet, or _credence_, three stories high, set out with many a row of grinning skulls, looking as pretty as gold and diamonds could make them; the second, every possible and impossible variety of odds and ends, culled from the carca.s.ses of martyrs; the third, enormous ebony presses, the secrets of which I begged for pity's sake might not be intruded upon for my recreation, as I began to be heartily wearied of sightseeing; but when my conductors opened the fourth mysterious door, I absolutely shrank back, almost sickened by a perfume of musk and ambergris.

A s.p.a.cious vault was now disclosed to me--one n.o.ble arch, richly panelled: had the pavement of this strange-looking chamber been strewn with saffron, I should have thought myself transported to the enchanted courser's forbidden stable we read of in the tale of the Three Calenders.

The prior, who is not easily pleased, seemed to have suspicions that the seriousness of my demeanour was not entirely orthodox; I overheard him saying to Roxas, "Shall I show him the Angel's feather? you know we do not display this our most-valued, incomparable relic to everybody, nor unless upon special occasions."--"The occasion is sufficiently special," answered my partial friend; "the letters I brought to you are your warrant, and I beseech your reverence to let us look at this gift of heaven, which I am extremely anxious myself to adore and venerate."

Forth stalked the prior, and drawing out from a remarkably large cabinet an equally capacious sliding shelf--(the source, I conjecture, of the potent odour I complained of)--displayed lying stretched out upon a quilted silken mattress, the most glorious specimen of plumage ever beheld in terrestrial regions--a feather from the wing of the Archangel Gabriel, full three feet long, and of a blus.h.i.+ng hue more soft and delicate than that of the loveliest rose. I longed to ask at what precise moment this treasure beyond price had been dropped--whether from the air--on the open ground, or within the walls of the humble tenement at Nazareth; but I repressed all questions of an indiscreet tendency--the why and wherefore, the when and how, for what and to whom such a palpable manifestation of archangelic beauty and wingedness had been vouchsafed.

We all knelt in silence, and when we rose up after the holy feather had been again deposited in its perfumed lurking-place, I fancied the prior looked doubly suspicious, and uttered a sort of _humph_ very doggedly; nor did his ill-humour evaporate upon my desiring to be conducted to the library. "It is too late for you to see the precious books and miniatures by daylight," replied the crusty old monk, "and you would not surely have me run the risk of dropping wax upon them. No, no, another time, another time, when you come earlier. For the present, let us visit the tomb of the catholic kings; there, our flambeaux will be of service without doing injury."