here he tried to plant the Inquisition among
his Flemings; he was already much soured with a world that had cloyed
him, and was perhaps considering even then how he might make his escape
from it to the cloister.

III

We did not know as yet how almost entirely dramatic the palace of the
Alcazar was, how largely it was representative of what the Spanish
successors of the Moorish kings thought those kings would have made it
if they had made it; and it was probably through an instinct for the
genuine that we preferred the gardens after our first cries of wonder.
What remains to me of our many visits is the mass of high borders of
box, with roses, jasmine, and orange trees, palms, and cypresses. The
fountains dribbled rather than gushed, and everywhere were ranks and
rows of plants in large, high earthen pots beside or upon the tiled
benching that faced the fountains and would have been easier to sit on
if you had not had to supply the back yourself. The flowers were not in
great profusion, and chiefly we rejoiced in the familiar quaintness of
clumps of massive blood-red coxcombs and strange yellow ones. The walks
were bordered with box, and there remains distinctly the impression
of marble steps and mosaic seats inlaid with tiles; all Seville seems
inlaid with tiles. One afternoon we lingered longer than usual because
the day was so sunnily warm in the garden paths and spaces, without
being hot. A gardener whom we saw oftenest hung about his flowers in a
sort of vegetable calm, and not very different from theirs except that
they were not smoking cigarettes. He did not move a muscle or falter in
his apparently unseeing gaze; but when one of us picked a seed from the
ground and wondered what it was he said it was a magnolia seed, and as
if he could bear no more went away. In one wilding place which seemed
set apart for a nursery several men were idly working with many pauses,
but not so many as to make the spectator nervous. As the afternoon waned
and the sun sank, its level rays dwelt on the galleries of the palace
which Peter the Cruel built himself and made so ugly with harsh brown
stucco ornament that it set your teeth on edge, and with gigantic
frescos exaggerated from the Italian, and very coarse and rank.

It was this savage prince who invented much of the Alcazar in the soft
Moorish taste; but in those hideous galleries he let his terrible nature
loose, though as for that some say he was no crueler than certa