Page:Lisbon and Cintra, Inchbold, 1907.djvu/87

Rh of Lisbon. Its conversion into a handsome town park with corso and other improvements was once on the tapis, but the Municipal authorities finding that a million pounds would scarcely cover the outlay abandoned the scheme.

From the palace to the Cortes seems a natural digression. Though the constitutional buildings are some distance away, the electric car soon takes one back to the Largo da Esperança, where the fine Rua de D. Carlos shaded by trees leads straight up to the Largo of S. Bento and the great, bare, massive exterior of the extinct monastery which since 1834 has been the Parliament House of Portugal. It was partly destroyed by fire in 1895, and the rear part in its reconstruction displays, though incomplete, an imposing façade. The Chamber of the Peers is severe and impressive with its sculptures by Calmels, its pictures, and the spacious galleries allotted to the public. The Cortes is the generic designation of the two constitutional Chambers of the country, one of the Peers, the other of Deputies. From the earliest times of the Gothic dynasty in Portugal there existed the States-general, or Cortes, for the enactment of statute laws for the nation. The Portuguese monarchy inherited the custom, making the same Cortes a representative assembly of the nation. Though D. Affonso Henriques was proclaimed king on the battlefield of Ourique in 1139, it was considered indispensable that the title of king should be conferred in the Cortes specially convoked at Lamego. There was no fixed time for its convocation. In the minority of D. Affonso V it was held every year while D. João III convoked it once only every ten years. The Cortes assembled at irregular intervals, decided by the reigning monarch, for 354 years, then 125 years passed during which no king convoked this national representative assembly. The next Cortes was a purely national congress, consisting of a 61