Note 69 — IRON-WORK

History of Architecture, p. 303. They possess, too, the advantage, from their ponderous solidity and fixedness, that most of them are still extant and in the best of preservation, although Napoleon's Vandals rooted up the chapel rejas of the Church of Santo Domingo at Granada, and turned them into bullets; just as their general, Sebastiani, threw down the tower of San Jerónimo to make a trumpery bridge across the trickling stream of the Genil. Scores of thousands of such crimes, not to forget the blowing up of the gate and tower of the Siete Suelos, were perpetrated by the French all over Spain; yet Washington Irving, in a strangely infelicitous passage of his Tales of the Alhambra, congratulates the invaders for their reverential treatment of the noblest monuments of Spanish art!