[Illustration: FROM THE RIBEIRA, OPORTO.]
A few yards distant, through a little maze of mediæval streets, is the cathedral, the Sé, with a quiet little courtyard before it, from the parapet of which the red roofs and abundant verdure of the city spread downward in waves to the water-side. These north Portuguese cathedrals are marvellously alike; sharing the early beauties and later barbarities of their successive generations of masters. This of Oporto is a good specimen. The sturdy warrior kings who wrested Portugal, bit by bit, from Castilian and from Moor, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, were true crusaders. Where they set their foot sprang up the Christian church, to testify for ever their gratitude for victory vouchsafed to the Cross that symbolised their faith. Solid and staidly devotional were the edifices they raised; and wherever their work remains unconcealed by the scrolly banalities of a later age, it bears still the impress of simple faith and unostentatious grandeur. Here on the hill crest at Oporto stand two massive low towers, one still crowned by the pointed Morisco machicolations of the twelfth century, whilst its fellow, partly rebuilt, is spoilt by the addition of a trivial eighteenth-century parapet, with urns as an adornment. Still, the massive solidity of the towers remains, which is something to be thankful for when we regard the hideous top-heavy early eighteenth-century façade that connects them. The south door, of majestic romanesque, is similarly marred. Around it has been built a barbarous porch, overloaded with meaningless ornament, which not only obscures the serious work of the early builder, but half covers and cuts in two a lovely old round window above the door which lights the transept inside. But, however much these curly horrors of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries may distract the eye, they do not destroy what is still visible of the old edifice. The double flight of low steps, for instance, which leads to this south door has for handrails two ancient stone serpents, so simple in design, yet so effective and perfectly adapted for their purpose, as to prove the unaffected but consummate artistry of the designer, whose taste must have been formed whilst yet the Byzantine traditions were strong in the stern romanesque.