For many years the spacious dining-hall, with the handsome carved ceiling, was used as a dissecting-room, but now that branch of study is carried on elsewhere, and the medical students do most of their work at the _Hospital Real_. Yet in spite of the absolutely neglected appearance of this college, the porter informed me that three hundred students work there every day. Over the general staircase there is a ceiling covered with _mudijar_ work (stalactite woodwork), the only example of its kind in Santiago. Behind the building are some picturesque but neglected Botanical Gardens for the use of the students.
The modern university building, which was designed by José Machado, is entirely of granite, and looks very important with its sculptured pediment supported by four Ionic columns, and its triple flight of steps. It has three storeys and a handsome marble staircase, and a central patio in which there stands a great two-faced clock, on a pedestal so tall that it can only be reached by a long ladder, and is therefore seldom wound up and not to be trusted. On the ground floor there are six spacious and well-lighted lecture halls, but the finest thing in the University is its splendid Library of more than seventy thousand printed volumes and some six hundred manuscripts, many of them “the sweepings of convents.” The books are arranged in cases, with wire in place of glass, round a spacious reading-room that will accommodate a hundred readers. Over the entrance is written--
In glass cases, placed in the centre of the reading-room, are some highly-prized literary treasures; among which I saw a beautifully preserved Commentary on Dante’s _Inferno_, by Landino, published at Florence, and bearing the date 1485; also an illustrated volume published by Schectel and Hartmann at Nuremberg in 1493, and other fine specimens of early printing. I also saw and handled an illuminated _Diurno_ or Book of Daily Prayer that had belonged to Ferdinand I., and bore the date 1055; in it I saw a miniature in which the copyist is presenting the book to the king and queen; all the capitals are illuminated, and all different. There is also some eleventh century musical notation in it, the notes are represented by dots (pentagrammic) over the words, and without any lines. The book itself tells us that it was written by Pedro and painted by Fructuoso. In the opinion of M. Macìus Férotin,[209] this _Diurno_ is the most precious document in the university of Compostela; its chronology, written in gold letters, fixes the chronology of the last three kings of Leon. Férotin thinks that the lines in honour of King Bermudo III. were dictated by the queen herself. Bermudo died in battle. Sanchez believed this treasure to have been among the “sweepings” of the monastery of _San Martin Pinario_. A beautifully bound volume of the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, with an exquisitely stamped leather cover, was also shown to me. In another case I found what is said to be one of the oldest, if not the very oldest, specimens of handwriting in Spain--a bit of brown parchment about eight inches long and four deep, representing a bill of sale of a little village called Nogueira, near Lalin. The date on it is Era 826 (A.D. 788), and the language used is Latin: it is from the great monastery of Carboeiro, in the province of Pontevedra. Another document was shown to me bearing the date 1504, it was the last will and testament of Don Alfonso de Fonseca, the founder of the university. Another parchment bore the seal of Alfonso VII.; this was a charter conferring certain privileges on a monastery. There were also two manuscript Bibles of the fifteenth century, written and illuminated by monks of the neighbouring convents; the text was in Latin, the pages were like silk, and the colours wonderfully preserved.