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If we cannot tell which Frenchman designed these tombs, we know the name of one who worked for the da Silvas at São Marcos, and we can also see there the work of some of their pupils and successors. São Marcos, which lies about two miles to the north of the road leading from Coimbra through Tentugal to Figueira de Foz at the mouth of the Mondego, is now unfortunately much ruined.
This fine undertaking set out early in 1875. To Sao Paulo De Loanda. At Loango, by invitation of Commander Hoskins, R.N., I transferred myself on board H.M. Steamship "Zebra," one of the nymphs of the British navy, and began the 240 miles southwards. There was no wind except a slant at sunset, and the current often carried us as far backwards as the sails drove us onwards.
Their palace stood close to the church of São Francisco, and must once have been a beautiful building. Unfortunately most of it has disappeared, and what is left, a large hall partly of the time of Dom Manoel, has been so horribly restored in order to turn it into a museum as to have lost all character. A porch still stands at the south end, but scraped and pointed out of all beauty.
Pilasters of inordinate height have been seen in some of the Lisbon churches, but compared with these which here stand in couples between the chapels they are short and well proportioned. These pilasters, which are quite seventeen diameters high, have for capitals coarse copies of those in São Vicente de Fora in Lisbon.
Another close to Guarda has a much richer corbel table with a large ball ornament on the cornice and a round window filled with curiously built-up tracery above the plain, round-arched west door, while further south on the castle hill at Leiria are the ruins of the small church of São Pedro built of fine limestone with a good west door.
The only part of the church which can possibly have been built in the thirteenth century is the central part of the west front. The pointed door below stands under a projecting gable like that at São Francisco Santarem, except that there is a five-foiled circle above the arch containing a pentalpha, put there perhaps to keep out witches.
On the morning of the 28th we reached the home buildings of the great Sao Joao fazenda, the ranch of Senhor Joao da Costa Marques.
The Princess with the green jacket was Sao Nang Wen Tip, wife of the ruler of the Chinese state Keng-hung, and half-sister of the Sawbwa of Keng-tung; her journey to Rangoon took fifty days; and she is well-known in western China and our Shan States as a states-woman and woman of business.
Much the same plan had been followed a little earlier by Affonso de Albuquerque, son of the great viceroy of India, when about 1570 he built the church of São Simão close to his country house of Bacalhôa, at Azeitão not far from Setubal.
These tombs, beautiful as they are, do not seem to have any very direct influence on the work of the next century: it is true that a distinct advance was made in modelling the effigies of those who lay below, but apart from that the decoration of these high tombs is in no case even remotely related to that of the later monuments at Batalha; nor, except that the national method of church planning was more firmly established than ever, and that some occasional features such as the cuspings on the arch-mould of the door of São Francisco Santarem, which are copied on an archaistic door at Batalha, are found in later work, is there much to point to the great advance that was soon to be made alike in detail and in construction.
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