and illustrates this by the case of Turner, as regards both his oil-paintings and his drawings. On the other hand, foreign Galleries are often as generously supplied with works of their own schools, in which we are seriously lacking. An exchange of superfluities by way of mutual loans for urgent needs would obviously be to the advantage of both countries. What do Frenchmen who cannot come to England know of the work of Turner or Gainsborough? Gainsborough is represented in the Louvre by a still-life picture of doubtful authenticity. We could well spare one or two examples of both these great English painters in exchange for, say, some fine French portraits and genre pictures of the 18th century in which we are found wanting.

What the Report terms the important but complex question of the relation of the Director of the National Gallery to the Trustees is dealt with briefly at the end of the Report; but in Appendix 26 is set out Lord Rosebery's Treasury Minute of 1894, in which the system of an autocratic Director, established on the advice of a select Committee in 1855, was abolished in favour of the system now existing, under which the Board, and not the Director, is responsible for all purchases made. The public will also be able to read for the first time the Trustees' own Resolutions of 1902, placing still further restrictions upon the methods of purchase, together with Lord Carlisle's Memorandum on the subject, criticising the Resolutions of 1902, and advocating a return to the conditions existing prior to the Rosebery Minute. The Report itself points out that a considerable body of outside opinion was in favour of reverting to the older system that prevailed from 1855 to 1894, under which the Director enjoyed almost autonomous powers; and that the Committee themselves were divided in opinion on the matter, two being in favour and two against any change.

ROBERT C. WITT.

Art. 4.-IÑES DE CASTRO AND PEDRO OF PORTUGAL.

THE 14th century was the time of Froissart and the Chroniclers. It was the Golden Age of story-telling. To us, who read those stories now, the picture that remains is one of a shadowy plain, half-hidden by drifting mists. The sunshine is bright on the mountain-tops, which rise here and there, crowned by palaces, with castles and fair gardens on their slopes. There in clear light people move. Knights ride out to battle, or go hunting with falcons and hounds. They revel and sing. There are tournaments and much feasting. All these things the writers of the old books loved, naïvely, as children love fairy tales. In that spirit they write their histories of the things which seem important in their eyes, uncritically, redundantly, for the pleasure of the telling. Therefore they are the most human of all historians, though they concern themselves so little with humanity in the wide sense.

It is one of these old true tales of theirs which I should like to tell again, the story of Doña Iñes de Castro, called Coello de Garza,' her life, her death, and the events which followed after, as they are related in the book of Fernando Lopes, Grand Chronicler of the Kingdom of Portugal in the latter half of the 14th century. It happened in the reign of Alphonso IV. This king succeeded his father Dinis on the throne of Portugal in the year 1325. A gentle-natured creature Dinis had been, delighting in poetry and music, and comfortable, pleasant things. He had made his palace a centre for the Troubadours, whose day was over in the countries whose glory they had been. In Portugal they found an Indian summer; for the verses written at the court of Dinis have for the last time the real touch of the old singers of Provence.

The King wrote many of the best of them himself. But his wife, his kingdom and his son were vexatious interruptions to his scheme of life. The Queen, the sainted Isabel of Aragon, disapproved of it actively. She disliked her husband's court and all its ways. Finally she built for herself a convent in the valley below the town of Coimbra, and adjoining it a house, in which she could

take refuge sometimes from him and his Troubadours. There she followed her own ways and led her own life austerely, practising her charities and happy among her nuns. She would have been horrified undoubtedly if she could have foreseen that an irony of fortune would make her house the retreat of Iñes de Castro. She died in 1336, ten years later than her husband, for Dinis had ended his cheerful life in 1325. He was mourned by his subjects. His death broke up a circle and ended an era. His minstrels wandered away and found no other home among the courts of Europe. Portugal, under her new King, heard the blasts of trumpets oftener than the music of lutes.

When once King Alphonso had gathered up the reins of government, he drove with a strong hand to the end. Before he came to the throne the Moors had been expelled from Portugal itself, but there was no security that they might not pour across her borders again at any moment, like the sudden waves of an ebbing tide. They were constantly invading Castile. Alphonso, who loved fighting, joyfully sped away to the rescue on these occasions, and he never returned defeated. But it was not until the year 1340 that the work was done. In that year his subjects saw him ride home, carrying the brazen trumpet of Abu Hassam, the leader of the Moors, and heard that he had fought a great battle at Tarifa, and that the enemy were scattered and flying. They never again invaded Castile in any numbers.

The King came back to Portugal and proceeded to try to set his own house in order. It is at this point that his interference in the affairs of Iñes de Castro begins; and, to make it understood, her story must be told from its beginning, long before the King plunges into the midst of it. He played a brutal part in it, but Alphonso was no cultivator of the finer feelings. He differed in this from his father and his son, as well as from his countrymen. King Dinis' delight in poetry and life's gaieties, and the passionate gloomy sentimentality which we shall presently see in King Pedro, were qualities thoroughly Portuguese. This is the reason why the tragedy of Iñes de Castro and Pedro has rooted itself so deeply in the nation's memory, and become encrusted with so much tradition. In these emotions King Alphonso had no

share. The murder of Iñes was an outbreak of his natural instincts, which were brutal. It failed of its end, and makes a blot on a fair record. But in spite of it Alphonso was no devil; and, as we are to think of him mostly in connexion with this, his ugliest action, it is well also to remember the words in which the old Chronicler sums him up-Rey muito honesto,' he says, 'a very upright king.'

In the year 1335 Iñes de Castro left her native Castile and came over the mountains into Portugal. At that time Alphonso IV had been ten years king. Under his rule the narrow kingdom of the west was holding her own among her neighbours, keeping her borders clear, building up her defences in ingenious ways, not only against the open enemy but also the seeming friend. The Christian princes of Spain reposed in each other no undue confidence. Nevertheless the Royal Houses intermarried most bewilderingly, and apparently fixed as high hopes upon the political results of these alliances as if experience had not shown them that brothers-in-law fought each other quite as gaily as anybody else. King Alphonso was particularly fond of spinning these matrimonial webs; and the occasion of the coming of Iñes to his kingdom was the marriage of the Prince Pedro, heir to the throne, to Donna Costanza, daughter of Juan Manuel, Duke of Villena in the kingdom of Castile. To this lady, Iñes was cousin, a daughter herself to the great Spanish house of Castro, many times allied to kings. Her father, Dom Pedro Fernandez de Castro, surnamed the Warrior, owner of many sounding title in the Spanish tongue, which translate poorly into their English equivalents, Captain General of Frontaria, and Grand Chamberlain to the King of Castile, held his territories among the Galician hills. Her two brothers we shall hear more of later, when they were high in favour at the court of Portugal, swaggering through audience chambers, protected momentarily by their sister's power from the anger of a nation whose blood was as hot and haughty as their own. Iñes came down from her father's mountain-castle in the train of her cousin; and so it happened that both women saw Pedro for the first time on the same day. The fates of the three were not separated again.

The marriage of Pedro with the Castilian Princess was characteristically complicated. Costanza had been repudiated just before by her husband the King of Castile, in order that he might marry instead of her Pedro's own sister the Princess of Portugal. Pedro himself had been affianced to another Castilian, Princess Branca, who had been brought up at the Portuguese Court and always destined to be his wife. The poor thing was half-idiotic, and died soon after in some nunnery, when the coming of her supplanter Costanza forced her away from the place which had always been her home.

Such were the arrangements made by King Alphonso for the marriage of his eldest son, and such the foundations for the rejoicings with which he welcomed the bride, little thinking that she brought along with her, in her cousin the Lady Iñes, the destruction of his hopes and of his kingdom's peace.

Pedro was very young at the time of his marriage with Costanza, young, gay, and very certain of himself, a poet like his grandfather King Dinis, a soldier like Alphonso his father. Iñes, when she came to Portugal, was a creature to draw all men's eyes. Coello de Garza' they called her, or 'The Heron-necked.' Her hair was long and golden. Four hundred years after her death, when Junot's soldiers tore off the marble top of the tomb in which she lies by Pedro's side in the royal abbey of Alcobaça, they found among her bones the thick strands of the marvellous yellow hair which the old books tell of.

How soon they loved each other after they met it is not possible to say. Donna Theresa Lourenço, a countrywoman of his own, held Pedro's affections before the coming of the Castilian women to the kingdom; and probably in the early stages of his acquaintance with Iñes he divided his allegiance between the two. Theresa Lourenço was the mother of Pedro's famous son King John I, Master of Aviz. But her influence waned as his love for Iñes grew. Nor do we know how long after their understanding began Pedro left her in his father's palace, in attendance on his wife. After a time certainly he took her away. She stayed perhaps in several places, but the one associated with her in the people's belief, and round which the stories of her life have clung, is the