side aisles so that the construction of
supporting buttresses was of course easier than at Batalha: and it is
well worth noticing how from so imperfect a beginning as the nave at
Batalha the Portuguese masters soon learned to build elaborate and even
wide vaults, without, as a rule, covering them with innumerable and
meaningless twisting ribs as was usually done in Spain. In the
north-westernmost chapel stands the font, an elaborate work of the early
renaissance; an octagonal bowl with twisted sides resting on a short
twisted base.

[Sidenote: Matriz, Alvito.]

Not unlike the vaulting at Villar is that of the Matriz or mother church
of Alvito, a small town in the Alemtejo, nor can it be very much later
in date. Outside it is only remarkable for its west door, an interesting
example of an attempt to use the details of the early French
renaissance, without understanding how to do so--as in the pediment all
the entablature except the architrave has been left out--and for the
short twisted pinnacles which somehow give to it, as to many other
buildings in the Alemtejo, so Oriental a look, and which are seen again
at Belem. Inside, the aisles are divided from the nave by round
chamfered arches springing from rather short octagonal piers, which have
picturesque octagonal capitals and a moulded band half-way up. Only is
the easternmost bay, opening to large transeptal chapels, pointed and
moulded. The vaulting springs from corbels, and although the ribs are
but simply chamfered they are well developed. Curiously, though the
central is so much higher than the side aisles, there is no clerestory,
nor any signs of there ever having been one, while the whole wall
surface is entirely covered with those beautiful tiles which came to be
so much used during the seventeenth century.

In the year 1415 her five sons had sailed straight from the deathbed of
Queen Philippa to the coast of Morocco and had there captured the town
of Ceuta, a town which remained in the hands of the Portuguese till
after their ill-fated union with Spain; for in 1668 it was ceded to
Spain in return for an acknowledgment of Portuguese independence, thus
won after twenty-seven years' more or less continuous fighting. This was
the first time any attempt had been made to carry the Portuguese arms
across the Straits, and to attack their old enemies the Moors in their
own land, where some hundred and seventy years later King Joao's
descendant, Dom Sebastiao, was t