[Illustration: “THE UNFINISHED CHAPELS,” BATALHA]
As I walked up the road leading from the hollow in which the abbey stands, I looked back again and again at the perfect loveliness of the building I was leaving behind. The flying buttresses, the lines upon lines of fretwork edging, the multitude of floreated pinnacles, and the glorious Gothic of the west front, all of the softened hue of old gold, presented in my eyes the perfection of a Gothic building. I have seen the stately grandeur of Amiens, the soaring pride of Cologne, the vast magnificence of Burgos, and the fairy prettiness of Milan, and I have worshipped at the shrines of Ely, Norwich, and Lincoln. Each one in its way is supreme and incomparable; but Batalha, reservedly nestling in its green hollow far from the busy haunts of men, has a charm of its own that I have found in no other Gothic church; and as I finally turned my back upon it, I carried with me a memory which in my life will never fade.
We are soon amongst the pines and heather again, driving along an elevated ridge with a valley and bold mountain ranges beyond upon either side, the effect of the distant hills seen through the perpendicular lines formed by the straight pine trunks that cluster on each side being very beautiful. A sort of light-blue veil seems to cover the far landscape, such an atmosphere as Corot loved to paint; not a mist arising from dampness, but the azure tint of the air itself seen by its clarity to a vast distance through the dark pine copses.
The first sign of systematic begging that I had experienced in Portugal was at Batalha; groups of children, encouraged apparently by the constant visitors to a show place, making a regular business of cadging: for we were getting now into the centre of Portugal where the people are less sturdy and the position of the peasant less prosperous than in the north. Along the road from Batalha to Alcobaça, a new and really charming form of begging was resorted to by the children on the wayside—chubby, well-fed mites they looked most of them, evidently not in abject want. They kneel on the roadside in an attitude of prayer, their hands joined in supplication, their eyes closed reverently and their expression rapt, like little dirty angels. They have before them a few cut flowers, and the moment the carriage passes them they start like a flash of lightning from their devotions, and throw the flowers into the stranger’s lap, whilst they begin to trot by the side of the vehicle in a dogged, persistent way, not articulately asking for alms, but simply trying to win a penny by reproachful glances and disregard of all entreaties to them to stop their dog-trot and go away. Needless to say, such tactics are usually successful, for only a very hard heart could withhold the small coin they covet, when an angelic-looking child of seven has panted half a mile barefooted by the side of a carriage going at a brisk pace.