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542 One might suppose that in Salamanca at least, if only in Salamanca out of all Spain, learning would predominate and for once the Church might take a subordinate place, but that would be to reckon without the Jesuits. If the University was to be for free learning they would counter it with their own special brand and so arose the Jesuit College which, as Baedeker drily remarks, "covers an area of 23,900 square yards." And there it is, a great barrack-like affair and so much the vastest building in the town that everywhere it dominates the view. By its side the discreet little University building might be a mere annexe. Baedeker tells one no more about the Jesuits. He will not take you in to the really rather magnificent Baroque chapel and he gives you no hint that inside the main door there is one of the loveliest cloisters in Spain. For Baedeker it is of the wrong period, being quite late Baroque, almost eighteenth century I daresay, but how lovely with the clean relief of its great disengaged pilasters whose arches each frame a circular opening and below that a rectangular. Something in the ingenuity of the invention and the clear logic of the proportions brings to mind the delicious fantasy of Wren's fountain quadrangle at Hampton Court, only instead of lawn and fountain one great heavily moulded wellhead sits in the middle of the paved rectangle.

But the Jesuits are not the only religious to settle in Salamanca—there is another large college of the "Irish nobles" (de los nobiles Irlandeses). Except for the austere beauty of its one cloister the Jesuits' is a grim place, but the Irish nobles have done themselves well. They sit on a hill a little apart from the town and their court is an inviting spacious grassy place enclosed on all sides by a two-storeyed cloister of simple, but very delicate, late Gothic design. Their chapel is of the same date and its architect adopted Hontanon's genial idea of a Gothic interior with dome. I guess it to be a little later than the Cathedral, for the Renaissance forms are more clearly marked and even the mouldings of the arches approximate to Classic forms. Indeed this Church and the very similar, though larger, one of S. Esteban provoke one to wonder why the peculiar and ingenious compromise which Hontanon had hit upon, did not develop to its ultimate logical conclusion. Why, having got so far, no one ever built a classic building with pointed arches. Why they did not try the possibility of keeping the great structural facilities for vaulting of the pointed arch. Per-