r entailed estate called Cordovis. These windows form two
sides of a small square summer-house; their shafts have capitals like
those of the dining-room windows at Cintra, and the horseshoe arches
are, as usual, cusped. A new feature, showing how the pure Arab details
were being gradually combined with Gothic, is an ogee moulding which,
uniting the two arches, ends in a large Gothic finial; other mouldings
run up the cornice at the angles, and the whole, crowned with
battlements, ends in a short round whitewashed spire.

Some miles from Evora among the mountains, Affonso of

[Illustration: FIG. 47.

CASTLE, ALVITO.

COURTYARD.]

[Illustration: FIG. 48.

EVORA.

CHAPTER HOUSE DOOR OF SAO JOAO, EVANGELISTA.]

[Sidenote: Sempre Noiva.]

Portugal, archbishop of Evora, built himself a small country house which
he called Sempre Noiva, or 'Ever New,' about the beginning of the
sixteenth century. It is now a ruin having lost all its woodwork, but
the walls are still well preserved. The plan is simple; a rectangle with
a chapel projecting from the eastern side, and a small wing from the
west end of the south side. All the ground floor is vaulted, as is the
chapel, but the main rooms on the first floor had wooden roofs, except
the one next the chapel which forms the middle floor of a three-storied
tower, which, rising above the rest of the building, has a battlemented
flat roof reached by a spiral stair. This stair, like the round
buttresses of the chapel, is capped by a high conical plastered roof. As
usual the whole, except the windows and the angles, is plastered and has
a sgraffito frieze running round under the cornice. There is a large
porch on the north side covering a stair leading to the upper floor,
where most of the windows are of two lights and very like those of the
pavilion at Evora. Two like them have the ogee moulding, and at the
sides a rounded moulding carried on corbels and finished above the
window with a carved finial. The capitals are again carved with leaves,
but the horseshoe arches have no cusps, and the mouldings, like the
capitals, are entirely Gothic; the union between the two styles, Gothic
and Arab, was already becoming closer.

Naturally Moorish details are more often found in secular than in
religious buildings: yet there are churches where such details exist
even if the general plan and design is Christian.

[Sidenote: Sao Joao Evangelista, Evora.]

Just to the north of the cathedr