stake. It was not a prancing, can-clicking
creature, like Dutch art; nor a naked giant,
chained with flowers, like Flemish after
Rubens; nor a saintly Madonna contemplating
votary, like Italian art; nor an opera
fan-painting posture-maker, like French. No,
it was a wrung, withered bigot, wrapped in
brown sackcloth, girt with a Jew-strangling
cord hid in a cavern of a cowl, next on its
horny camel's knees before a bleeding image
crowned with thorns, and above the thorns
starry glory. Beat its skeleton breast bloody;
tore its priestly ring of grey hair; kissed
sculls, and lashed itself with thorny thongs.
It was essentially a slave of the church and
of the court in Spain; the twin upholders of
bodily and spiritual slavery. If it sneered at
a ruddled court lady, it was whipped into the
Inquisition; if it smashed up with a mallet
the Virgin's image, whose price the mean
noble haggled at with the proud sculptor
and painter, there was the same certain
terminus of independence, or rebellion: the
Inquisition. If the man with the pallet
shield, blazoned and ringed with colour,
refused to paint an insolent grandee: the
Inquisition. If he painted too crude, or not
flattering enough, or too strong: always the
Inquisition. No wonder that Spanish art
grew up a monkish, dusty-faced fakir, with
no sunshine on his face, and the red reflection
of the Inferno ever shining in his cruel, yet
frightened eyes. No wonder, as the snakes
round Leonardo's Medusa, its background
darkness teemed with threatening awful
shadows, breathed up from Tophet.

No wonder that I longed to get away
from the ghastly Saint Jerome of Torrigiano,
at the Seville Museum, who has been for two
centuries beating his bony breast to a pulp
with a round paving-stone; or Saint Dominic,
opposite, who, having torn his back to a
redcurrant jelly, is left like an angry school-master
with only the stump of the scourge
in his hand. Fortunately for rue, as I stand
in the long hall of the Museo, once a convent,
gaping at these austerities of fire-lighting
faith, it suddenly strikes me that Saint
Jerome looks exactly, as some traveller used
to say, like a man preparing for his cast at
skittles; and Saint Dominic like a rival
player, shaking his fist from over the bowling
alley, and challenging him to come on like
a man. Having discovered this bit of rough
humour about the two saints, I instantly
break into a merry laugh, harmless enough,
but highly offensive to the irritable and sore
pride of the curator, whom I have to pay
two pesetas to for worrying at my elbow,
and flogging me with ridiculous comments on
the pictures, and at whose attention and
condescension in taking my money I am
brutal enough not to be grateful, having once
ascertained that the Murillo pictures are
all marked with a pink ticket and number
in the corner, and the grand, gloomy
Zurburans with a green one. At the receipt
of this and other information, I am always
expected to solemnly bow to the mechanical
insolent wretch thirsting for my shillings. I
soon see that if the curator has one prejudice
in the world, it is for these Murillos he gets
his shillings by showing. He has a peculiar
way of snubbingly pointing at them with his
chin, and patronisingly alluding to their
merits, that, as a personal friend and lover of
Murillo, exasperates me. But what is there
to do? I could not flatten his bump of
self-esteem even by a three weeks' beating.

But, before I begin my ramble through
the old deserted convent—  the choicest nest
of Murillos in the world (at least, his
religious pictures, for his children have
wandered away from the earth hovels of
Seville)— I must recall the chief Spanish
painters as they struck my dull eyes collectively
in the various Spanish galleries. Let
me begin with Velasquez—Don Rodriguez
de Silva y Velasquez—born in this very city,
that, if I were a Moorish king, I would at
once go and bombard with oranges till it
surrendered; black eyed beauties, church-plate,
and all. Let me take this handsome
son of the Portuguese exile lawyer, the
pupil of the fiery, dashing Herrera, who
was born in the very year Vandyck opened
his eyes in half-Spanish Antwerp. Was
it not this very day I saw his portrait,
in his tight doublet, plain white collar,
buckled belt and dagger, with the celebrated
cross (hanging by a gold cord to
his neck) that the Spanish king admiringly
added to the portrait of himself, the
bushy-haired, gipsy, swarth man had newly painted.
There he is with his short, stubby brushes,
his stately maul-stick, and bag-shaped pallet.
There he is, with his waving moustachios
sweeping almost up to his eyes, his fine oval
face, and swelling bumped-out brow. Have
I not seen all the rustic drinkers, and rouged
Infantas, and sturdy Dons, and boy horsemen,
and young queen-wives, he ever painted,
and know their dark charm and the Spanish
magic of their strong grace?

And then there is Zurburan, whose majestic
Saint Peter—a divine anger on his swollen,
prophetic brow—quite knocked me backwards,
when I suddenly came on it yesterday
in a side chapel in the murky cathedral of
Seville; and Cano, and Roelos, and Pacheco.
Can I recapitulate them all?

Herr Schwartzenlicht, the travelling agent
of some National Gallery or other, who
has been for some minutes grubbing on his
knees, smelling at the right-hand corner
of the Saint Thomas of Villanueva, suddenly
rises, and pronounces, in an oracular voice,
that the third toe on the left foot of the
brown beggar with a bandage round his
head is decidedly "out of keeping." Now,
the peculiarity of Herr Schwartzenlicht is a
love, which he shares with several others
of his unbiasable craft—that of flourishing
perpetually, like the glittering swords