Page:Lisbon and Cintra, Inchbold, 1907.djvu/73

Rh buildings have found a refuge. Many of them merit as specimens of ancient sculpture and decoration to be under cover for their surer preservation from injury. The large buildings of the extinct monastery adjoining have long ago been converted into barracks. The idea occurred to me as I passed from the overcrowded enclosed exhibits to the sky-domed naves that if the same society which rescued the church could procure this old monastery for a national repository of archæological relics, the valuable collections that ably conducted archæological research in Portugal itself could procure, added to those already garnered, would perhaps result in a museum of the same high standing as our South Kensington.

Two interesting stone tanks or fountains stand in the principal nave, both in the Arab style. One came from the extinct monastery of Penha Longa on the Serra of Cintra. The other was brought from Barbary after the conquests in 1462, and given to Prince Henry the Navigator who in his turn presented it to the Sé at Faro for a holy water receptacle. It had been lying neglected in the cemetery there for years before it was rediscovered and removed to this spot. A Roman, marble sarcophagus, the only one yet discovered in the Iberian Peninsula of the fourth-century period deserves notice. When discovered half-buried in mud in a quinta of Estremadura, it was being used as a pigs' trough. There are many escutcheons of stone and marble; among them one from the gateway of the City Walls opening on the Ribeira Velha, of the time of D. Fernando, and another with his royal arms of nine castles and the open crown, dating from 1350. Other sarcophagi, dating back to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, interesting as specimens of old Portuguese sculpture and historical records, stand in the central chapel. They have all been rescued from religious edifices 49