tion: 25 GARDENS OF THE ALCAZAR]

If I went again to Seville I should try to visit them--but, as it was,
we gave our second day to the Alcazar, which is merely the first in
the series of palaces and gardens once stretching from the flank of
the cathedral to the Tower of Gold beside the Guadalquivir. A rich
sufficiency is left in the actual Alcazar to suggest the splendor of the
series, and more than enough in the gardens to invite our fatigue, day
after day, to the sun and shade of its quiet paths and seats when we
came spent with the glories and the bustling piety of the cathedral. In
our first visit we had the guidance of a patriotic young Granadan whose
zeal for the Alhambra would not admit the Alcazar to any comparison,
but I myself still prefer it after seeing the Alhambra. It is as purely
Moorish as that and it is in better repair if not better taste. The
taste in fact is the same, and the Castilian kings consulted it as
eagerly as their Arabic predecessors in the talent of the Moslem
architects whom they had not yet begun to drive into exile. I am not
going to set up rival to the colored picture postals, which give
a better notion than I could give of the painted and gilded stucco
decoration, the ingenious geometrical designs on the walls, and the
cloying sweetness of the honeycombing in the vaulted roofs. Every one
will have his feeling about Moorish architecture; mine is that a little
goes a great way, and that it is too monotonous to compete with the
Gothic in variety, while it lacks the dignity of any form of the Greek
or the Renaissance. If the phrase did not insult the sex which the faith
of the Moslem insufferably insults, one might sum up one's slight for it
in the word effeminate.

The Alcazar gardens are the best of the Alcazar. But I would not ignore
the homelike charm of the vast court by which you enter from the street
outside to the palace beyond. It is planted casually about with rather
shabby orange trees that children were playing under, and was decorated
with the week's wash of the low, simple dwellings which may be hired
at a rental moderate even for Seville, where a handsome and commodious
house in a good quarter rents for sixty dollars a year. One of those
two-story cottages, as we should call them, in the ante-court of the
Alcazar had for the student of Spanish life the special advantage of
a lover close to a ground-floor window dropping tender nothings down
through the slats of the shutter