rather hopeless Juan de Castillo, Murillo's
master, who, compared to Ghirlandajo, the
goldsmith painter, who taught Michael Angelo
or Perugino, who taught Raphael, is, as I
heard a jocose English traveller colloquially
observe—"A poor ha'porth of cheese."

Leaving all sorts of gloomy pictures
unnoticed behind me, I soon learned to see the
thoughtful yet happy innocence of Murillo's
virgins, though I thought the golden,
perpetual sunlight of the "napkin" picture,
rather too much of a hot chestnut tone of
brown ; but I suppose, to the end of time,
lovers will call red hair auburn and golden,
and one cannot be severe on a critic who
suffers from a short delirium of good-nature.

For my part I prefer the little picture,
(though it is an allegory) which I saw yesterday
over the altar of the small chapel, of the
Guardian Angel, in the dim cathedral of
Seville. The angel, in a yellow girt-up robe
and purple mantle, points to Heaven with
one hand; and, with the other, leads on a little
lively, tripping, yet sturdy child—emblem of
the human soul. I was walking round the
little episcopal dens of chapels, reading the
frontispiece pictures that are panelled above
their entrances, when I saw this divine picture.

Now the picture, where a covey of thirty-three
cherubims, who continually keep flying
probably because they are unable to sit, and
who shower down on Saint Francis the red
and white roses, picked from the briars with
which he has been scourging himself, I have
never seen; nor have I the picture of the
child telling Saint Augustine that he will no
more explain the mystery of the Trinity than
he could put the sea into a finger-hole in the
sand-pit; but I never hope to see a finer
picture than the Charity of the Thomas of
Villanueva—the pearl of the gallery—the
most ambitious and inventive in composition,
the most refined and varied in expression.
which Murillo used to call fondlingly, "Su
lienzo (his own picture)." It is merely the
Saint in sharp white mitre and black robes
stooping at the door of his cathedral distributing
alms to a crowd of Spanish beggars.

It took Bartholomew Stephen Murillo a
long life, with his black cataract of hair
streaming down from hia broad full forehead
over his shoulders, before he could paint
these lean-limbed bandaged Sevillian beggars
so well. He could not have quite done this
painted argument for Charity when for
covering his school-books with saints and
virgins, he was sent to his kinsman, Juan del
Castello, to look at art afar off, while rinsing
brushes and grinding colours. He appears
here grown somewhat, since by the red
brasier in winter, or under the court-yard
awning in summer, he copied Torrigiano's
Mano de la Teta, or stripped his brown arms
that his fellow-students might copy them in
conjunction with pots and pans, melons and
peaches, quails and herons. He has grown
since, with a burning brow, when his master's
school removed to Cadiz, he had to stroll
about in the Thursday markets, amid stale
fish, fruit, old iron, and pottery with muleteers,
gipsies, and mendicant friars to sell
his cheap daubs of Saint Onophrius, Saint
Christophers, our Lady of Carmels, to captains
of ships and South American exporters.
Think of the poor painter, now an orphan,
starting to Madrid on foot to petition the
court painter Velasquez to help him on the
road to Rome, whither he is never destined
to go. Now we see why he, who sometimes
painted an archangel playing the fiddle to Saint
Francis, San Diego blessing a basin of soup,
and the soul of that villain Philip the Second
ascending to heaven in a globe of fire, loved
these naked cripples that he has here strewn
round the gentle prelate with the starched
mitre, and we see where he sat to notice that
happy knavish beggar-boy, not much warped
from his first innocence, who runs to his careworn
mother to show her the maravedi which
the good almoner has put into his hand.

And that this is one of the old market-place
recollections we know, because the
original sketch of the same good Archbishop
of Valencia dividing his clothes among some
poor children, was actually picked up at the
Seville Feria by an English collector. Murillo
was not an imaginative man, and his real
subjects are simply street children, virgins,
and saints. Of art-learning he had little; but
he had what no academy can give—heart.
He painted from that, and not from his
head. Of head painters we know many; but
only one heart painter.

How deliciously the rosy flesh of the
children contrasts with the soft ascetic darkness
of the prelate's robes and the rich transparent
browns, deep without being clotty or
glutinous of the background. What a bright
serene nature shines through this picture
that preaches so loudly of charity! Murillo,
himself a father, loved to paint the Child
Saviour in conjunction with thin-faced saints,
who have shut themselves out from so large
a branch of sympathy with the world as
paternity implies; for, in this same room he
has twice painted Saint Anthony and the
Infant Jesus; in one picture standing; in
another, sitting on the open folio which, the
unhappy hermit, who needed the purging of
so much temptation, has lately been
annotating. Murillo has achieved the difficult
task of making the Infant Saviour beam
with a divine intelligence and yet a perfect
child. Whether painting the angels, cooking
the Franciscan's dinner, the good Queen of
Hungary healing the celebrated scald-head,
or the jar of white lilies in the Saint Anthony
picture that church-going sparrows have been
known to peck at, Murillo never painted
children more beautiful than these. The only
excuse for Mr. Buskin's sneer at the low
vice and dusty feet of Murillo's beggar boys,
is, that he has never been to Spain and seen
any Murillos that are worth seeing.