Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The two middle arches have each a sp' feet, and are nearly two hundred fe' bed of the stream. Those at the rower, but all are round and spr' buttressed piers, which, in turn piers whose impression of str enormous. We are told th water in the gorge is th' in time of flood it pilf hundred and eighty f of such a torren
...t and yet, save for the hand of m to-day as wh/ One of the ' restored b by the P in 18? Bi tir Roman dqueduct, Sfgovia. the battlements are two mouldings, one of which may have been introduced as a dripstone, and, therefore, may have been entirely utilitarian; but two could not have been necessary, and the two lines of shadow add so much to the beauty of the bridge that their decorative effect can hardly have been entirely absent from the builder's mind. The bridge over t he broad Guadiana at Merida, although its construction is necessarily not so great a tour de force as that at Alcantara, is still a magnificent work. It crosses the river in sixty-four arches, and is half a mile long. Even to-day it is one of the longest bridges in the world. At Segovia, Tarragona, and Merida are splendid aqueducts, that at Segovia still remaining one of the most stupendous works of the Roman Empire. At Tarragona are yet to be seen portions of the Roman wall, some of it of cyclopean masonry, whose foundations are said to be of Carthaginian work. At Murviedo, Italica, and Merida are remains of splendid theatres, that at Murviedo, according to some authorities, being the best preserved Roman theatre extant. At Murviedo also is found a remarkably fine piece of Roman mosaic. The arch of Torre de la Barca, and the tower of Corunna complete the list of the more famous existing monuments of the Roman period in Spain, but it by no mea...
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