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Updated: June 24, 2025
Such a building as Santa Engracia is the real ending of Architecture in Portugal, and its unfinished state is typical of the poverty which had overtaken the country during the Spanish usurpation, when robbed of her commerce by Holland and by England, united against her will to a decaying power, she was unable to finish her last great work, while such buildings as she did herself finish for it must not be forgotten that Mafra was designed by a foreigner show a meanness of invention and design scarcely to be equalled in any other land, a strange contrast to the exuberance of fancy lavished on the buildings of a happier age.
On the return journey from Mafra to Cintra he nearly lost his life, owing to the girth of his saddle breaking during his horse's exertions in climbing a hill. Borrow was cast violently to the ground; but fortunately on the right side, otherwise he would in all probability have been bruised to death by tumbling down the steep hill-side.
Hobhouse, that his friend made a more perilous, though less celebrated, achievement by water than his crossing the Hellespont, in swimming from old Lisbon to Belem Castle, Byron praises the neighbouring Cintra, as "the most beautiful village in the world," though he joins with Wordsworth in heaping anathemas on the Convention, and extols the grandeur of Mafra, the Escurial of Portugal, in the convent of which a monk, showing the traveller a large library, asked if the English had any books in their country.
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