At the end he would have
delivered us over to a dealer in antiquities hard by the gate of the
palace if I had not prevented him, as it were, by main force; he did not
repine, but we were not sorry that he should be engaged for the next
day.
Our way to the gate, which was the famous Gate of Justice and was lovely
enough to be the Gate of Mercy, lay through the beautiful woods, mostly
elms, planted there by the English early in the last century. The birds
sang in their tops, and the waters warbled at their feet, and it was
somewhat thrillingly cold in their dense shade, so that we were glad to
get out of it, and into the sunshine where the old Moorish palace lay
basking and dreaming. At once let me confide to the impatient reader
that the whole Alhambra, by which he must understand a citadel, and
almost a city, since it could, if it never did, hold twenty thousand
people within its walls, is only historically and not artistically more
Moorish than the Alcazar at Seville. Far nobler and more beautiful than
its Arabic decorativeness in tinted stucco is the palace begun by
Charles V., after a design in the spirit of the supreme hour of the
Italian Renaissance.
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