Page:Impressions of Spain in 1866.djvu/83

Rh cathedral, escorted by the kind and good-natured dean, who engaged the venerable mother of the ’Little Sisters of the Poor' to act as his interpreter, his Andalusian Spanish being utterly unintelligible to most of the party. The first feeling on entering is of unmixed disappointment. It is a Pagan Greco-Roman building, very much what our London churches are which were erected in the time of the Georges. But it has one redeeming point — the Capilla de los Reyes, containing the wonderful monuments of Ferdinand and Isabella, and of Philip and Joan. The alabaster sepulchres of the former, wrought at Genoa by Peralta, are magnificent, both in design and exe- cution. Isabella's statue is especially beautiful:

The faces are both. portraits, and have a simple dignity which arrests the attention of the most unobservant. A low door and a few steep steps below the monuments lead to their last resting-place. The royal coffins are of lead, lapped over, rude and plain (only the letter F distinguishes that of the king), but they are genuine, and untouched since the day when their bodies, so justly revered by the Spaniards, were deposited in this humble vault.