bull-fight,
carted materials for their new cathedral's erection, and all this they
did of their own free will.

[Illustration: SEGOVIA CATHEDRAL]

The act of consecrating the finished building constituted a grand
holiday. The long aqueduct was illuminated from top to bottom, as was
also the cathedral tower, and every house in the city. During a week the
holiday-making lasted with open-air amusements for the poor and banquets
for the rich.

The date of the construction of the new building was contemporaneous
with that of Salamanca, and the architect was, to a certain extent, the
same. It is not strange, therefore, that both should resemble each other
in their general disposition. What is more, the construction in both
churches was begun at the foot (west), and not in the east, as is
generally the case. The oldest part of the building is consequently the
western front, classic in its outline, but showing among its ogival
details both the symmetry and triangular pediment of Renaissance art.
The tower, higher than that of Sevilla, and broader than that of Toledo,
is simple in its structure; it is Byzantine, and does not lack a
certain _cachet_ of elegance; the first body is surmounted by a dome,
upon which rises the second,--smaller, and also crowned by a cupola. The
tower was twice struck by lightning and partly ruined in 1620; it was
rebuilt in 1825, and a lightning conductor replaced the cross of the
spire.

Though consecrated, as has been said, in 1558, the new temple was by no
means finished: the transept and the eastern end were still to be built.
The latter was finished prior to 1580, and in 1615 the Renaissance dome
which surmounts the _croisee_ was erected by an artist-architect, who
evidently was incapable of giving it a true Gothic appearance.

The apse, with its three harmonizing _etages_ corresponding to the
chapels, aisles, and nave, and flanked by leaning buttresses ornamented
with delicate pinnacles, is Gothic in its details; the ensemble is,
nevertheless, Renaissance, thanks to a perfect symmetry painfully
pronounced by naked horizontal lines--so contradictory to the spirit of
true ogival. Less regularity and a greater profusion of buttresses, and
above all of flying buttresses, would have been more agreeable, but the
times had changed and new tastes had entered the country.

Neither does the broad transept, its facade,--either southern or
northern,--and the cupola join, as it were, the eastern and t