Men Bestriding Their Donkeys
Rode Fearlessly Through The Dust, And One Cleanly-Looking Old Peasant
Woman, Who Sat Hers Plumply
Cushioned and framed in with a chair-back
and arms, showed a patience with the young trees planted for future
Shade along the desperate avenue which I could wish we had emulated.
When we reached the entrance of the old Carthusian Convent, long since
suppressed and its brothers exiled, a strong force of beggarmen waited
for us, but a modest beggar-woman, old and sad, had withdrawn to the
church door, where she shared in our impartial alms. We were admitted to
the cloister, rather oddly, by a young girl, who went for one of the
remaining monks to show us the church. He came with a newspaper (I hope
of clerical politics) in his hand, and distracted himself from it only
long enough to draw a curtain, or turn on a light, and point out a
picture or statue from time to time. But he was visibly anxious to get
back to it, and sped us more eagerly than he welcomed us in a church
which upon the whole is richer in its peculiar treasures of painting,
sculpture, especially in wood, costly marble, and precious stones than
any other I remember. According to my custom, I leave it to the
guide-books to name these, and to the abounding critics of Spanish art
to celebrate the pictures and statues; it is enough for me that I have
now forgotten them all except those scenes of the martyrdom inflicted by
certain Protestants on members of the Carthusian brotherhood at the time
when all sorts of Christians felt bound to correct the opinions of all
other sorts by the cruelest tortures they could invent.
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