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We supposed by this young lady's behaviour, and we afterwards found our supposition to be true, that it is a most unusual thing for ladies to travel in Spain. With one or two exceptions, we had the ladies' coup? to ourselves from one end of Spain to the other, and very comfortable travelling we found it.

Our tickets came to hand in due time. We took our seats, the train moved slowly, and we felt fairly off to Spain. There was a pleasant excitement about such a journey just then, for every one prophesied a revolution in Madrid; it might come to-morrow, it must come soon, people said; and we were thought very venturesome to venture beyond the Pyrenees at all. Not that the sense of danger attracted us. We had come to Spain with very definite objects, and though we could not help feeling that the sooner a revolution came for the Spaniards the better, we hoped that it might not come till we were safely at Gibraltar, at least. The pictures of Velasquez, and the Moorish relics of Cordova, Seville, and Granada, were the loadstones that drew us to Spain; at the same time we could not but be alive to the great political and social questions agitating a country once so glorious, and still so capable of glorious things. But in a stay so short as ours was likely to be, we despaired of seeing more than the surface of Spanish thought and life, however much we might wish for other opportunities. It made us smile then, and it makes me smile now, to review the magnitude of our preparations for this trip. And now let me put down, if putting down be possible, a very absurd notion that, to travel comfortably, you should travel without luggage. I have travelled a good deal, and if I were writing a manual for all future tourists, I should affix, as a motto to the book,--"Always travel in your best clothes, and with half-a-dozen trunks at least." Luggage and good clothes take the place of a train of servants. Luggage and good clothes ensure you good places, general civility, and an infinity of minor comforts. Luggage and good clothes will prove your good angels wherever you go. It is all very well for savages to travel without luggage--the Japanese Grandees don't even carry pocket-handkerchiefs about with them; but if any one wants to travel pleasantly and profitably, let him carry a well-stored portmanteau. Surely in no country but patient Spain would two ladies have been allowed to fill the first-class compartment of a railway carriage in the way we did. Under the seats, on the seats, above the seats, were piled an infinite variety of packages, a box of medicines, a folding india-rubber bath, a basket of provisions , two or three parcels of books, two or three bundles of rugs, a leather bag of sketching materials, sketching blocks of various sizes, a silk bag of needles and threads; lastly, an odd bag, containing note-books, opera-glasses, passports, a tea-pot, a water-bottle, an etna, an air-cushion, slippers, and sundries without number.

But I must go back to Burgos where the purples and crimsons ended and the desert began. We arrived a little before midnight and felt ourselves at last in Spain. The very air had, as we thought, a foreign smell, and so greatly did this feeling of novelty overcome us that all our Spanish vocabulary seemed to vanish just when it would have stood us in good stead. However, we found places in the omnibus of the Fonda del Norte, and, after waiting about three quarters of an hour, rattled thither in company of several Spanish gentlemen who were wrapped to the chin in their bandit-looking cloaks, and smoked away without intermission. Two or three long-limbed, black-eyed, rosy-cheeked young women, wearing enormous chignons of false hair, but no costume unless untidiness may be called one, led us upstairs flaring candles over our heads. "Dos cuartos," we said; "Si, si," they replied, and on they went, climbing stair after stair, till at last we caught hold of their sleeves in breathless expostulation; and they consented to descend. Finally we were consigned to rooms on the third floor, so spotlessly, ideally clean, that a sanitary inspector could have found nothing to suggest. The rooms had whitewashed walls, iron bedsteads that might have come out of Heal's warehouse, deliciously cool floors of brick-red tiles, wool-mattrasses, sweet-smelling home-spun sheets, and pillows bordered with the lace of La Mancha. We slept delightfully, though the noise of the watchman calling the hours half awoke us now and then.

I have called the building a city in itself, and if a census were made of its silent population, there might seem some reason in such a simile. Who can doubt that these sculptured saints, archangels, kings, apostles, and monks without, these bleeding Christs, Virgins, infants, and martyrs within, would equal in number the living, moving world of Burgos? And this multitude, stony, silent, dead, though it seems, is not without a power and force that stand in good stead of vitality. Every Christ has its special congregation, every martyr its believers, every saint its legend quickening thousands of devotees to this day.

There is no trace of Moorish influence in the building, and despite many excrescences of bastard-Gothic and Renaissance work, the old Cathedral is still to be seen in all its beauty, reminding you of the purest thirteenth-century Gothic of France. All who have time to study it thoroughly will at the same time acquire a good deal of history, for there is hardly a portion of it which does not show the thought and work of many minds and periods. Spaniard, Gascon, Fleming, Englishman, Florentine, have all had a hand in this glorious work, which gradually increased in size and splendour, till nothing more remained to do except to disfigure it in these later times; which I am sorry to say has been done, within and without, by various means called "restoration."

But what makes Las Huelgas of peculiar value to students is the evidence of Angevine influence in the architecture. Queen Alienor, as Mr. Street justly observes, would naturally procure the help of some architect from her father's dominion of Anjou in the abbey she induced him to found; and one finds here the early vaulting common to old churches in Anjou and Poitou. But these special objects of interest are less interesting than the general effect of the whole place.

It was here, indeed, that we were bodily as well as spiritually transported back to the middle ages. The transformation happened in this wise. After wandering about the cloisters we came unexpectedly upon a scene that simply enchanted us. It was the nuns' chapel. Looking through a screen of delicately wrought cast-iron, we saw two kneeling figures dressed in the black and cream-coloured robes of the Cistercian sisterhood. They were as motionless as statues; and we felt them to be a part of the place as much as the Gothic arches, the stained walls, and the marble altars. So mediaeval and ideal was the picture, that, when we came away, we felt as if we of the nineteenth century were dreaming, and the life of those women kneeling in the coloured light the only reality after all!

The roads are so bad around Burgos that it was with great ado we got to the celebrated Monastery of Miraflores, though it only lies two miles off the town. It is a dreary drive. The road winds around hills so bleak and desolate, as to give us an uneasy suspicion when a beggar in a long black cloak came to the carriage-door begging. He looked exactly like a bandit; and if it had not been for our sturdy coachman we should have trembled for the gold Isabelinoes we carried in our pockets.

Coming home we saw a regiment at practice. The soldiers were the shabbiest set I ever saw, the music poor, and the whole thing spiritless enough; but all the people of Burgos seemed to have turned out for the sight.

In Spain the railways are not made for travellers, but travellers for railways. The trains run so slowly and so seldom that a journey of any length always requires self-denial in the matter of sleep. No matter whither you are bound, to Alicant, to Cordova, to Saragossa, to Badajoz, you must rise early and not go to bed at all; and it is with very great management and disregard of comfort that one can contrive to travel by daylight through the most interesting tracts of scenery. To go to Madrid in the daytime we had to rise at four o'clock. It is true that the train did not start till nearly seven; but, whether you like it or not, in Spain you are always aroused an hour before you want to get up,--always carried off to the station an hour before the train starts, and to the steamers at least a quarter of a day too soon. People seem in such terrible haste to be rid of you, agreeable as the acquaintance may seem to have been on both sides.

This waiting about in the raw, cold air of an autumn morning is not without its compensations. Everything takes a supernatural shape in the ghastly lamplight; the horses that have brought us here seem, on a sudden, slim and spectral; the long lines of railway carriages have a funereal look; the men, waiting about in their long black cloaks, become brigand-like and terrible to look at; one's own shadow is mysteriously long and dark; one's own voice sounds hollow and unearthly. It is like reading a scene from Mrs. Radcliff's novels. But when once the train moves slowly off, and the blessed sun warms you, it is the very poetry of railway-travelling. The carriage is so comfortable, the speed so easy, the quiet so delicious, that it is worth while coming to Spain to gain such an experience. No one seems impatient to arrive anywhere; if indeed, any one is bound anywhere. The train stops at every station, and at some so long that you might take photographs in the interval. If you alight to lunch or stretch your limbs a little, you are never hurried back into your carriage, but can loiter about in the pleasant assurance that the train is sure to wait for you. "The train is going to stop; now for a sketch," we used to say when we approached a station; and there was always time.

And then there is the ineffable sense of safety. A single gauge leads from the French frontier to the Spanish capital; the up-train waits for the down train half-way, and each goes its destination as lazily as Kentish farmers jogging to market. How can there be accidents or discomforts under such circumstances?

Tourists are apt to complain of the incivility of officials in Spain. I can only say that we travelled from Biarritz to Gibraltar, and encountered nothing but courtesy and kindness. We spoke a little Spanish, it is true, and had left England with a solemn compact never to get out of temper, which may, perhaps, in some degree account for such experience. And we always travelled in the first-class carriage reserved for ladies. I do not think English ladies would find second and third-class travelling pleasant, on account of the smoking.

Thus we travelled through the brown deserts of Old Castille to Madrid. Treeless, tawny, and interminable, anything more dreary than these same Spanish steppes cannot well be conceived. Yet there was contrast and colour for the artistic eye. There was mass after mass of cool, grey limestone against a bright blue sky; and when the sun set over the undulating table-lands, a weird, fiery, unimagined splendour not to be put into any words!

THE GAIETY OF MADRID.--THE IMPERATIVENESS OF TEETOTALISM THERE.--THE QUEEN AND THE ROYAL BIRTHDAY.--ROADS AND RIVER-BANKS.--APROPOS OF BULLS.

There is no more stir at the railway-station of Madrid than at that of Tunbridge Wells or Chelmsford; and as you rattle along the quiet streets, you ask yourself--Can this be the capital of so many great kingdoms? It is the fashion to represent Madrid as a dreary place, but, on the contrary, its first aspect is eminently cheerful. The streets are light and airy, the sky is generally without a cloud, and the population is a gay and unique one. I suppose Madrid is the only capital in Europe where the upper classes can be said to cling to anything like costume, for certainly the long cloaks of the men, and the mantillas and fans of the ladies, do merit the name of costume still. In Spain it is possible for a man to be dainty about his dress, since every cloak can be lined in different styles of luxury, with silk, with velvet, with fur, or with brocade. The upper cape of the cloak is thrown over the left shoulder in such a manner as to expose the lining; and as you walk along the streets, you are lost in admiration of a dress so graceful, and think regretfully of the orthodox great-coat worn in London, when a little colour would be so pleasant to the eye. Put a Spanish cloak upon every man in Fleet Street and Piccadilly, and how the bits of creamy fur, of crimson silk, of purple velvet, of gold brocade, would enliven these sober thoroughfares! But the Madrilenians are not a majestic race, though so majestically equipped. Diminutive in size, sallow, shaven like monks, one never dreams of calling the men handsome. At the same time they have, for the most part, beautiful features and fine eyes. The ladies, tripping about fan in hand, are pretty; but, like the men, frail-looking and without dignity. Treacherous as is the climate, they go about bare-necked, bare-headed, and with only a fan to shade them from a dangerous sun. Yet one sees the same thing everywhere--whilst the women wear tight-fitting clothes, and expose themselves to wind and sun, the men are wrapped up like Arabs in the easiest, most sensible dress possible. In England we are growing wiser, and we no longer kill our young girls by making them wear tight stays, thin shoes, and back-boards; but in Madrid--I suppose one of the unhealthiest places in the world--it never seems to enter into any one's head that what is dangerous to a man is doubly so to a woman.

It will be easily understood why Madrid should be so unhealthy when a little consideration is given to its site. Built on a plateau 2412 feet above the sea, it is exposed to an African sun and a Siberian winter. Like Rome it stands in a treeless desert; and the icy winds may blow down from the chain of the Guadarrama, whilst the sun is scorching with fiery powers. You may pass in a moment from a cold climate to a hot one in Madrid; and at all times the air is so rarefied as to be terribly trying. I enjoy excellent health as a rule, but the climate of Madrid knocked me down in a day. I was tormented by a constant neuralgia; my face swelled up so that I could hardly see out of my eyes; and I became so languid that I could hardly set one foot before the other. Yet one must not take stimulants. Never shall I forget the dismay with which an English lady saw me take wine at dinner.

Every one coughs everywhere. The men cover their mouths and keep on the sunny side of the street, as if death lurked in a "shady place;" whilst the ladies , who go bareheaded, have a frightfully fragile look. Indeed it is the very rarest thing to see a really robust-looking person in Madrid. The curled darlings of society are pale as spectres, the waiters and shopmen are thin and cadaverous; a fresh, beautiful look of health one meets nowhere. I don't think this matter of climate is sufficiently taken into account by those who write about Spain and the Spaniards; for there is no denying the fact that since Madrid became the capital of this great country, its greatness grew pale and wan. Bred in a hot-bed of consumption, of colic, and all sorts of diseases, is it any wonder that the Madrilenian degenerates both in body and in mind, till he no longer looks capable either of mental or physical exertion? Wherever we found ourselves, at the Prado, at a review, on the Puerto de Sol, or in the churches, we were always looking at the sickly, lethargic population around us, with the thought--Is this the stuff of which reformations and revolutions are to be made?

And then the dire effects of the Inquisition must be taken into account. Who can doubt that for some of the mental and physical debasement witnessed in Spain at the present day the system of Ignatius Loyola is alone responsible? Torture, enslave, terrify a dozen men and women, and see what their children and children's children will become? But whether this reasoning may be received as a mere fancy or not, the fact remains incontestable,--the upper ten thousand of Madrilenian population is the most miserable-looking of any in the world. Of Madrilenian society we had no experience, for, though we were furnished with letters of introduction, more important objects claimed our time. It is the greatest mistake to do two things at once, and having come to Madrid to see and study the Velasquez Gallery, we had no inclination to neglect this end for any other. As a substitute for personal experience, we read Spanish newspapers, modern Spanish novels, and plays; and though, as far as the latter goes, it was rather hard work, we felt the curriculum to be instructive. Putting aside the charming stories of Caballero and Trueba, the modern Spanish novel is a poor affair, and the play a poor affair too; but any one who really wishes to be entertained and instructed should read the social sketches of such writers as Don Ramon Mesonero de Romanos, Pedro de Medrazo, and Jos? de Larra, who describe their country and countrymen with inimitable grace, satire, and discrimination.

Of anything like political news, much less political discussion, there was seldom a vestige.

But though the Government has succeeded in bridling the tongue of the press, there is abundance of contraband talk in Madrid. No matter with whom you converse, the topic is sure to be of bloody revolutions and retributions unequalled in history. But mention the Royal name, and, whether you are among aristocrats or peasants, you will see dark looks, meaning shrugs of the shoulder, gestures significant of bitterest meaning.

"It must come soon," people say to you; "and the sooner the better, though dire will be the coming of it. Never in history were such wrongs, such hatred, such tyranny, to be washed out in blood. We can only watch and wait."

The acquaintance of a day,--nay, of an hour, is sufficient to warrant all sorts of confidences on public matters from a Spaniard, and this incautiousness, or rather candour, makes you forgive even his love of the bull-fight. It is, indeed, a most consolatory fact, that it is but a watching and waiting in Spain, and that underneath a semblance of indifference burns and rages a wholesome desire of liberty.

"We are at the present moment enduring a tyranny of which foreigners have no conception," said a cultivated Spaniard to me, one day, in English; "and yet, despite of all that is going on secretly among us, no one can say when things will change. Change they must; we shall have the French Revolution acted over again in the streets of Madrid."

Again: we were taken to see the graves of some young officers of high family who were shot in prison during the disturbances of last year. A respectable man of the lower ranks was standing near, and he said, with tears in his eyes, but half-suppressed curses on his lips,--

"They were as innocent as new-born babes; though, thank God! this murder won't long want vengeance."

It would be almost impossible to convey any idea of the bitterness and hatred we found underlying the public mind at this epoch.

People gave us their confidences without any reason for doing so, confidences which all amounted to one and the same thing--contempt of the tyranny and resolutions to overturn the tyrants. "No one can tell how uncomfortable it is to live in Madrid now," said an English lady to me one day. "It is the old fable of the sheep and the wolves over and over again. We are constantly laying in stores for three or four weeks' siege; but I've done it so often in vain that I have determined never to do it again, and I daresay the consequence will be that a revolution will come and find my larder empty."

The great hindrance is from the badness and uncertainty of the government. There is no security in the land, without which there can be no spirit of enterprise. Who can say what to-morrow will bring forth? "A Spanish cabinet," an English writer wittily says, "may be compared to a Chili house, constructed on a calculation that an earthquake will occur within the year." All the best energy of the nation is spent upon the unhealthy excitement of political transformations. It is like living in an atmosphere overcharged with electricity. One moment, there is a succession of lightning-flashes, all sorts of brilliant miraculous heralds of a tempest that is to clear the air; then comes a growl of thunder, an outburst of popular feeling in Barcelona or some distant part; and all is hushed again for a short space, when the symptoms occur again and again without coming to a crisis.

But this underlying suspense and unrest do not interfere with the gay, out-of-door life of Madrid. The weather is always fine, and the Prado is always crowded.

There is nothing livelier in Europe than this same Prado, with its crowd of pretty ladies, picturesque cavaliers, dear little carriages for babies drawn by spotlessly white lambs, nurses from Estramadura in short, brown petticoats, embroidered with gold, water-sellers in sombrero and leathern gaiters, and an infinity of equipages, costumes, and cries, to distract the eye and ear of the foreigner. But if you are tired of gaiety, in ten minutes you can get into a scene so peaceful and quiet, that you might fancy yourself miles away from a capital. Drive down to the green banks of the Manzanares, where a thousand peasant women are beating linen in the afternoon sun. Their red and yellow skirts, and plentiful black hair, make quite a picture, and their blithe talk and singing never cease for a moment. Yet how tranquil and rustic it is here! One has a superb view of Madrid, with its background of blue and white mountains, palace and church and house-top flushing in the light of the setting sun, whilst the hum of its busy life seems silenced for a while. The river winds amid sloping banks of lustrous green, lightly sprinkled with yellow foliage, and team after team winds its sleepy way towards some village seen in the distance.

It sounds incredible, and yet it is true, that, within half-an-hour's drive of Madrid, the roads are impracticabilities for any carriage having springs. I do not think there is a lane in Sussex, or in any heavy land district of Suffolk, where you could be so jolted in a tumbril as we were in a light cab just outside the Spanish capital. We found the same state of things throughout our journey. I suppose there is no functionary answering to that of our parish surveyor. No one seems to mind having his bones rattled over the stones, as if he were a "pauper whom nobody owns."

I feel in duty bound to say a word about the Bull-fight, though let no one shut this book, thinking that I am about to describe that horror of horrors. Heaven knows, it is a sight that any one might make something of, for added to the accessories of a burning blue sky, and a picturesque assemblage of nine thousand people excited to the verge of frenzy, there are all the savage elements of the human and animal nature called into full play. But what I saw of "this bloody amphitheatre of Rome, with spectators in hats and coats," as Ford calls it, so sickened me, that I never recur to the subject without repugnance. Before I left England I was told by an educated Spaniard that bull-fights were going out of fashion, and that his countrymen, at least those of the upper classes, no longer attended them. But what did personal experience teach me? It taught that Spanish ladies do go to bull-fights, and, moreover, that they take with them their young children, who clap their hands at the close of every bloody act, and watch the whole cruel drama as eagerly as their elders.

The wide street leading to the Plaza de Toros was so crowded with people going to the bull-fight, that it was with some difficulty we could get along. All Madrid seemed turning out for the sight, and yet it was a weekly one; and, on this occasion, of no exceptional attractiveness. On grand festivals there are extra bulls killed and far greater crowds; but all who wish to know more about bull-fights, past and present, should go to that fountain-head of knowledge on Spanish affairs, Richard Ford. There is one consideration apt to be overlooked by those who are studying the subject, and that is, the hand-to-hand struggle between man and brute. From the moment the show commences till its close every player, whether he be chulo or banderillero, picador or matador, places his life in peril--not for the love of sport, mind, but for the sake of gain--and frequent occurrence of grave accidents, and the possibility of fatal ones, may well account for the pale faces of these desperate creatures. Only a few weeks before our arrival at Madrid, a well-known matador had been killed at Seville, and the whole horrid scene was described to us by an eye-witness. There was no show of sympathy made for the man; but cries of "Brava, toro! Bravo, toro!" filled the arena from end to end. The son of the murdered man took his father's place!

For my part all my sympathies go with the bull. He, poor beast! is often the most peace-loving creature in the world, and, anyhow, suffers ten times more than the horse, which is not goaded into frenzy by shouts, arrows, fire-works, sword-pricks, and dogs, but is allowed to die quickly. The bull is tortured to the last as if he were a heretic. Pitiful it is to see him crawl into some quiet corner to die, with what regrets for his peaceful pastures, with what horror of his tormentors, with what quivering agony in every nerve, Heaven alone knows!

It sounds incomprehensible, and yet it is quite true, that bull-fights are often held for charitable purposes. A few years back a new church at Madrid was to be built. A committee was formed for the purpose, consisting of an archbishop, several bishops, noblemen, and others; the land was given, and the building commenced. But some money was wanting, and so they had a bull-fight, the proceeds of which helped them on a little. Later, their necessities were even more pressing, and they tried another bull-fight. This time, however, the owner of the bull-ring refused to give them a benefit, and other means had to be tried.

Cruelty begets cruelty, and as if the appetite for blood were not satisfied at the circus, the churches offer more in abundance. Anything more revolting than the bleeding, bruised Christs and saints, cannot be conceived. No shape nor symbol of suffering is left out of the dreary catalogue till one comes away, sick with the ghastly blasphemies witnessed on every side. This is all the sadder, since a real spirit of religious fervour seems predominant; and the brighter side of Romanism is never wholly hidden from the eyes of even the most superficial or prejudiced observer.

And what has not Murillo done to beautify this Church of Spain, whose annals are so stained with blood and tears?

VELASQUEZ, THE PAINTER OF MEN.--MURILLO, THE PAINTER OF ANGELS.--RIBERA, THE PAINTER OF INQUISITORS.--ZURBARAN, THE PAINTER OF MONKS.--GOZA, THE HOFFMAN OF SPANISH ART.--THE QUIETUDE OF THE GALLERIES.

We had come ostensibly to Madrid to see the works of Velasquez, and we carried out our intention, not glancing at, but really looking into and studying them as we study Homer, or Shakespeare, or Cervantes. The journey from London to Madrid is costly and fatiguing; but I advise any one to make it who is desirous of receiving a good lesson in art. I own that no one has taught me such a lesson on the largeness of it, the perfectibility of it, the ease of it. Velasquez' work is simple creation, and that is the truth of it. Where will you find work like it? He was no poet like Murillo or Raphael. He sucked in no golden atmosphere that saints and seraphs breathe; he heard no music of the upper spheres, but he lived among ordinary men and women, and portrayed them, flesh and spirit, without an extravagance, without an idealism, without the hairbreadth of a deviation from the truth. Thus it happens that when you come away from his pictures, you forget the painter and the painting, and you remember only the subjects,--not elevated subjects, often quite the contrary, but aesthetically conceived by an intellect so unswerving, and touched with a hand so masterly, that they seem to "live, and move, and have their being."

As has been truly said, "He drew the minds of men; they live, breathe, and seem ready to walk out of their frames. The dead come forth conjured up; we behold what written history cannot give--their actual semblance in life. His power of painting circumambient air, his knowledge of lineal and a?rial perspective, the gradation of tones in light, and shadow, and colour, give an absolute concavity to the flat surface of his canvas; we look into space, into a room, into the reflexion of a mirror." And elsewhere, "Aucun ma?tre ne saisit comme lui un personnage pour le faire vivre, agir, respirer devant vous. En m?me temps, quelle tournure il lui donne! Comme il a le secret de cette fleur d'insolence et de ces belles rodomontades, dont ? nos yeux l'hidalgo Castilien est le type!"

I suppose most people would prefer Murillo to Velasquez, because imagination is generally set on a pedestal above intellect. Murillo's imagination is like an upsoaring fountain, ever sunny and ever luminous, whilst Velasquez did not dream, but reason. He is, indeed, the most logical of painters; and what makes his works so valuable to artists and lovers of art is the quality they have in common with the masterpieces of antiquity, and which has been well called the perfection of good sense. As a French author has said, "Velasquez ?crit en prose, mais, pour le portrait, du moins, il est le premier des prosateurs."

The Museo of Madrid contains more than sixty pictures of this great master,--the Voltaire of art, who tried his hand at everything and succeeded in everything,--portraits, landscapes, historic subjects, animals, interiors, flowers, fruit. There is nothing he left untried excepting the marine. It is quite astounding with what nobility he treated ignoble subjects, such as dwarfs, beggars, dull Infantas, and kings with "the foolish hanging of the nether lip," painting all to the life; for though Velasquez was a courtier and a court-painter, he never flattered his royal patrons one iota. He treated ignoble subjects nobly, that is, faithfully, seeing and respecting in dwarfs, beggars, and foolish Infantas and kings, the same humanity that he saw in such lofty, stately Spaniards as he has elsewhere given.

Study one of Velasquez' greatest pictures as a whole, as a creation in fact, and then set yourself to look into the manner of it, how much remains still to marvel at and admire. Moratin said, "Velasquez knew how to paint the air;" and nothing is more striking in his pictures than this clear, palpable, sunny atmosphere; one seems to breathe in it, and not in that of the galleries.

But when you have made this discovery, you will make others no less striking. Take, for instance, his colouring. Perhaps no painter ever employed fewer colours than he; he is as sparing of bright tints as a classic writer in the use of similes, yet his pictures glow with life and are perfect miracles of harmony and truth to nature. His painting has been well compared to a stately gentleman who maintains in his conduct, his actions and his words, a perfect and dignified equilibrium, and who avoids loud laughter or talking, or anything that might disturb the general harmony of his bearing and appearance.

His work, indeed, resembles his life, which was courtly, dignified, and complete. Though a courtier, he kept intact his pure manners and morals, his kindly nature, and his passionate love of art. All that is known of him redounds to his honour, from the period of his early youth, when he worked in the studio of Pacheco, and by his fine qualities of heart and brain won his master's affection and the hand of his master's daughter, to the fatal journey to Irun in 1660, where he brought on his death by overworking himself in preparing the 'Ile de Faisans' for the Infanta's marriage. Of all noble Spaniards, hardly Cervantes seems to have been nobler than he.

Wilkie used to visit the gallery every day, no matter what the weather might be, and to establish himself in a chair opposite this picture. After having contemplated it fixedly for three hours in silent ecstasy, he would utter a long and profound "ouf," seize his hat, and rush away.

Hanging close to the wonderful "Las Meninias," is a religious picture, which every one should look at, for never had picture a stranger and more touching history.

Don Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velasquez, the rich courtier, the familiar friend of the king, and the renowned artist, had a mulatto slave named Juan Pareja. It was Pareja's office to mix the colours, to prepare the canvas, to clean the brushes, to arrange the palettes; and these occupations kept him perpetually in his master's studio. He felt himself to be a born painter all the time that he exercised these humble duties, he watched his master at work, he listened to the instruction he gave his pupils, he spent his nights in making sketches and copies secretly. At last, when he was forty-five years old, he thought himself sufficiently accomplished in his art to make his secret known. Accordingly, one day he placed a small picture of his own, with its face turned to the wall, among his master's; and when the king came to the studio, as he often did, brought it forward. "That's a beautiful picture," said Philip; "whose work is it?" Upon which Pareja threw himself on his knees and avowed that it was his own. Velasquez freed him from slavery by a public act, and received him, from that day, among his pupils and equals. But poor Pareja was so used to service and so devoted to his master, that he would fain have served him as a freedman; and after the great painter's death continued so to serve his daughter.

From Velasquez, who lived in an age when Spain was great, and interpreted the spirit of it with the faithfulness of photography, and an introspective power quite Shakspearian, one naturally turns to his friend and pupil, the divine Murillo.

At first sight, the blazing sun of Velasquez' genius would seem to obscure and dwarf the paler orb of Murillo's. It is like passing from Cervantes to Calderon; and if the one paints men and manners with inimitable force and humours, the other takes us straight up to heaven, where we abide with saints and angels.

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