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Both show the influence of early Italian and Flemish schools, but they have a concentration and poignancy in the expression of suffering which is national and individual. They painted religious subjects exclusively, and in their mode of depicting the Ecce Homo, Mater Dolorosa, Agony in the Garden, and Descent from the Cross, there is a singular bitterness of anguish, the moral and physical sentiment of the gall and wormwood, the vinegar mingled with honey. This quality they have in common, but in other respects they differ widely. There are but half a dozen pictures by Morales, only one of them on a more cheerful subject, the Presentation at the Temple, in which the youthful Virgin advances toward the aged Simeon at the head of a lovely, lightly moving band of girls, imbued with innocence and simplicity. Juanes has nearly twenty pictures in the Madrid gallery, of which five constitute a series on the history of St. Stephen. As well as I can remember, their size is three feet by two, and they are crowded with figures excellently drawn and spirited even to exaggeration; when this tendency is controlled, the expression of the faces is wonderful; the coloring is bright and clear, but they are deficient in atmosphere. On the same wall hangs a life-size three-quarters-length portrait of Don Luis de Castelvi, a Valencian nobleman of Charles V.'s time, a man in the prime and pride of life, in a dark, rich, bejeweled dress; it is a splendid picture, worthy of Titian or Moor, and might have been painted a century later than the series of St. Stephen. There is also a small picture, by the same master, of the Coronation of the Virgin, a 16mo canvas so to speak, composed in the conventional manner with rows of doctors, confessors, martyrs, saints, and angels, and executed with the patient care of Hamling or Van Eyck. The versatility of which these two last-named pictures give proof is extraordinary, considering

the clearness of conception and firmness of execution which are also to be found in all Juanes' works; he did not waver and falter between different styles, but went straight from one to another, with a fixed purpose and a steady brush. Tradition says that he was noted for devoutness, and his life was almost that of an anchorite; the sacred images always hung in his studio, and he never omitted to pray before beginning to paint. Fervor of devotion, intensity of supplication, are the strongest characteristics of Spanish religious pictures: in these they are unapproached by any other school. Murillo's saints are so absorbed in prayer, their look of entreaty is so compelling, that the celestial apparition descending toward them seems but the natural, the necessary, answer to the appeal: the limits of sense, of space and time, are forgotten; they are insensible to the cold, heat, thirst, and fatigue which waste them; they are consumed by a desire for a nearer communion with Christ, and it must needs be vouchsafed to every one who so beseeches. There is nothing of the placid rapture and beatitude of Italian pictures on the same subjects; the look with which the saints in Spanish art receive their divine visitors is one of infinite assuagement and consolation rather than of actual bliss; the remembrance of pain is never absent. Even in the St. Anthony of Padua of the Seville gallery the predominant expression is that of relief from prolonged strain and suffering. They are profoundly affecting pictures. Spanish religious art goes far to explain Spanish religious persecution.

The native painters all seem to have possessed this capacity for conviction; it is signally illustrated by Velasquez's famous Crucifixion, his one religious picture. Among the fifty and odd canvases by him in the gallery of Madrid there are one or two on sacred subjects, but they might as well be secular. In the Crucifixion our Saviour is represented as just dead: the face and

form are of great beauty, attenuated by an austere life and recent torture; the head has sunk on the breast, and one heavy lock of dark hair falls across the right side of the face and almost hides it; the clay-like hue of the flesh, a few drops and streaks of dark blood, are the only tokens of physical suffering; the face has in its expression all the words uttered from the cross, which is erect in appalling solitude against the blackness of darkness. The picture is out of place in a gallery; it is fit only for a church, to be unveiled in Passion Week. It is, as I have said, strictly speaking Velasquez's only religious picture, and it strikes one as though the painter had been exhorted to pronounce his creed, had summed up his whole belief in this Crucifixion, and had left it to the world as his profession of faith.

Velasquez's pictures, besides being splendid works of art, reflect the court life of his country and century like the palace mirror in his canvas of Las Meninas. They depict the famous personages of his day, the royal pleasuregrounds, with old-fashioned fish-ponds and formal avenues, processions of state coaches and troops of stiffly-robed lords and ladies who have got out of them to take the air; they chronicle the existence of the royal children, encompassed with artificial restraints of brocade and etiquette; they reveal the courteous, chivalrous side of the national character in the magnificent surrender of Breda, where the Duke of Spinola accepts the keys of the captured city as if they were a gift; they betray its barbarous side in a strange assemblage of dwarfs and jesters. The dwarfs are a collection of every type of humanity afflicted with that particular deformity. There is one called El Primo, whose poor little body supports the head of a philosopher, with phrenological indications of high moral and intellectual qualities, and a sad, selfcontained, thoughtful, handsome, middle-aged face; he is turning over the

leaves of an ancient tome, in which it is easy to believe that he may find consolation. Next to him hangs a diminished and distorted copy of the human form in the mockery of a rich dress, crimson embroidered with gold, surmounted by a big head with irregular features lighted by a pair of dark eyes like live coals, and an expression of acute mental suffering and hopeless revolt against fate. The face burns with passionate grief and hatred, but there is nothing base in it; on the contrary, there is a capacity for love and devotion. I heard a number of people, on first coming up to it, echo my own silent exclamation, "Triboulet!" Beyond this is a less painful picture of the conventional dwarf, tolerably well proportioned, with a round face, long curly hair, and the choleric expression of a child who is alternately petted and teased. The little fellow, splendidly dressed like a court page, stands stoutly on a pair of good legs, holding his whiteplumed hat; beside him there is a fine mastiff, as tall as himself. Next is a poor half-witted creature, sickly and misshapen, with a cunning but harmless face, blurred features, and a dim glance; if he was not tormented he was probably not unhappy. The last of the series is merely a small monster; the heart swells and sickens at the thought of his being made the butt of jokes and tricks. The jesters are a very different race, and look quite able to take care of themselves; their common trait is an irritable eye and the air of paid assassins. There is one of them painted in a very simple scarlet dress, holding a naked sword in his hand, with a fine face and figure, but so grim of aspect that I took him at first for the king's bravo or the state executioner. There is a deplorable absence of landscape-painters among the Spanish artists. Velasquez has left half a dozen sketches of villa gardens and parks, but there is nothing else of the sort, so that one turns for relief to the fine landscapes of the Low Country mas

ters in the side-rooms. This is a curious. deficiency in the native art.

I have no intention of going through the list of the pictures, or even the painters, in the Madrid gallery, but I cannot turn away from it without mentioning Juan Pantoja de la Cruz, Sanchez Coello, and Alonzo Cano: the first two are among the fine portrait-painters of the sixteenth-century; the last is a seventeenth-century painter of sacred subjects, noted also for being almost the only sculptor of merit whom Spain has produced in later times. Between the old and new schools of Spanish painting stands Goya, who died about fifty years ago in extreme old age. To my thinking, he is the most original genius of modern times. There are few of his pictures out of Spain: one or two in the Louvre, one or two in Belgium, and Americans might have seen two volumes of his Caprichios in the Spanish government building of the Centennial Exhibition. Everybody who turned over those pages will remember the frenzy of fancy, reveling in the grotesque and horri ble. Spanish galleries are full of Goya's pictures, and the streets of the subjects from which he took them. His compositions have a grace, dash, and "go," a freedom of first impulse and an audacity, inconceivable to those who do not know him. The criticism of Goya in Théophile Gautier's eloquent and picturesque travels in Spain gives as good a notion of his genius as words ever can do of works of art.

To Gautier also may be referred those readers who wish to know a bull-fight by hearsay; they can satisfy their curiosity by reading his chapter on the subject, which leaves nothing for any other traveler to add. The crowd returning from the sport along the Alcala, a long, wide street leading from the Puerta del Sol to the Bull Ring on the outskirts of town, is one of the most extraordinary sights which Europe affords in the present century. A disorderly battalion VOL. LIV. — NO. 321.

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of omnibuses, barouches, light wagons, coupés, four-in-hand breaks and drags, cabs, mule-carts, and numberless nameless vehicles, some drawn by a single horse or donkey, some by two, three, four, or six, with jingling bells and dangling fringes and tassels, filled with fine ladies and gentlemen dressed in Paris fashion, with women of the town in black lace mantillas, bunches of carnations in their hair and fans in their hands, with middle-class dandies in round cloaks, with peasants in Andalusian jackets and red berrets, with people of the lower orders in any sort of rag, rush by helterskelter, pellmell, like a routed army, smoking, singing, laughing, shouting, interspersed with hundreds of horsemen and thousands of people on foot dodging the carriages. The arrogance of everybody's demeanor passes belief, from the blue-blooded grandee with a title as old as the kingdom to the beggar with his tattered cloak draped over his shoulder and his battered hat cocked over his left ear and slouched over his right eye. Such an aggressive assertion of independence and equality is unknown even in France, and can be seen in our own happy country only on St. Patrick's day. Everybody is as good as everybody else, and better, except when a barouche tears by with the bull-fighters in their sumptuous costumes of embroidered satin and velvet; then the whole multitude does homage with huzzas and waving hats. The rabble gallops on across the Prado and up the steep streets on the city side, filling the Puerta del Sol for a noisy half hour, then pouring off down a dozen diverging streets, when the Puerta del Sol returns to its normal condition of a vast human ant-hill of idle ants. Yet if this mad multitude at the height of its frenzy meets a priest and his acolyte carrying the Host to a sick-bed, the tumult is instantly stilled, the on-rush checked in full career, and every knee is bent and every head uncovered, while the tinkling of the little

bell can be heard. These weekly saturnalia strengthen the impression of the semi-civilized condition of Spain which a stranger receives from numerous and divers trifles. Neither the country nor the society has kept pace with the age. Even the gossip from high-life, which reaches him remotely, has not the ring of chit-chat of the present day; the scandals of modern Spanish society are so gloomy and romantic, with the highsounding names of the actors in them, that they are fit for plots of the tragedies of two hundred years ago. The discrepancies in the mode of life of people of rank and wealth are among the symptoms of this semi-civilization. The royal palace, a fine building with a long front and wings agreeably divided by pilasters, stands upon a bluff above the thirsty little river Manzanares, a broad, terraced drive leading down to the base, where an extensive orangery shows a thick screen of dark foliage and bright fruit through great glazed doors and windows. At the foot of the declivity lies the Caza del Moro, or Chace of the Moor, a small uninclosed park of fine trees, formal shrubbery, and walks converging toward a central fountain. Between this pleasure-ground and the river, directly under the eyes and nose of royalty, a belt of wretched houses occupied by washerwomen stretches along the bank; it is an untidy laundry, a mile long, and the king and queen cannot leave the palace in this direction without crossing a tract of fluttering house and body linen which comes between the wind and their nobility. It is the only way of reaching the Caza del Campo, a royal park for pheasants and ground game which lies just beyond the city limits, on the farther side of the Manzanares. The Caza del Campo is not a gay resort; indeed, it is hardly a resort at all. I rode there two or three times, the regular promenades, the Buen Retiro and Castillanas, being too crowded and circumscribed for exercise; and I met

hardly anybody except a few groups of ladies in black walking near the entrance followed by their carriages. Etiquette a word which is not obsolete in Spain

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prohibits the fashionable drives to people in mourning, so they come to this deserted chace to stretch their limbs. There is no pretense of keeping the place up; there are some short drives in good condition, bordered by fine trees, but they soon merge into rough roads, leading among low hills and abrupt hollows, spotted with a gnarled, dusky, evergreen oak, and as lonely as the surrounding country. The ground is covered with short, close grass and aromatic herbs, over which the smooth-paced Spanish horses canter lightly, keeping a sharp lookout for rabbit-holes, as the whole domain is little better than a warren. The small, brown masters of the soil start up at every moment, wrinkling their noses at intruders from the. height of their hind-paws, and only on instant peril of being ridden down disappear into their subterranean abodes with a twinkle of a white-lined tail. From the hilltops there is a view on one hand of the wide, desolate, barren plain, sloping up gradually to an expanse of pale green table-land, level as the sea, and melting into the horizon; on the other, low hills tread on each other's heels, until they are stopped by the long crenelated wall of the Guadarrama range, violet and lilac and silvered with snow. Southward Madrid stands up on its bluff, showing the long, many - windowed fronts of its public buildings; and at this distance its flat roofs and light tints give it a more foreign appearance than it wears in its streets and plazas, with a faint suggestion of the East. Here, on these breezy hills, one escapes from the immediate climate of the city, which has the peculiarity of Boston, so trying to the nerves, of stringing them to cracking-points, while it induces a constant sense of fatigue; at Madrid, too, humanity is under the "whip of the

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sky." The water, on the contrary, which does not come from the panting Manzanares, but from springs among the Guadarramas, is deliciously soft: under

its influence the skin becomes like velvet and the hair like floss-silk; after a bath the body is as smooth as if it had been anointed.

BIRD-GAZING IN THE WHITE MOUNTAINS.

It was early in June when I set out for my third visit to the White Mountains, and the ticket-seller and the baggage-master in turn assured me that the Crawford House, which I named as my destination, was not yet open. They spoke, too, in the tone which men use when they mention something which, if you had not been uncommonly stupid, you would have known already. The kindly sarcasm missed its mark, how ever. I was quite aware that the hotel was not yet ready for the "general public." But I said to myself that for once, at least, I was not to be included in that unfashionably promiscuous company. The vulgar crowd must wait, of course. For the present the mountains, in reporters' language, were "on private view;" and for all the ignorance of railway officials, I was one of the elect. In plainer phrase, I had in my pocket a letter from the manager of the famous inn before mentioned, in which he promised to do what he could for my entertainment, even though he was not yet keeping a hotel.

Possibly I made too much of a small matter; but it pleased me to feel that this visit of mine was to be of a peculiarly intimate character, almost, indeed, as if Mount Washington himself had bidden me to private audience.

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shade of an elm, I gazed at the snowcrowned Mount Washington range, while the bobolinks and savanna sparrows made music on every side. The song of the bobolinks dropped from above, and the microphonic tune of the sparrows came up from the grass, sky and earth keeping holiday together. Almost I could have believed myself in Eden. But, alas, even the birds themselves were long since shut out of that garden of innocence, and as I started back towards the village a crow went hurrying past me, with a king-bird in hot pursuit. The latter was more fortunate than usual, or more plucky; actually alighting on the crow's back and riding for some distance. I could not distinguish his motions, he was too far away for that, but I wished him joy of his victory, and trusted that he would improve it to the full. For it is scandalous that a bird of the crow's cloth should be a thief; and so, though I reckon him among my friends, — in truth, because I do so, I am able to take it patiently when I see him chastised for his fault. Imperfect as we all know each other to be, it is a comfort to feel that few of us are so altogether bad as not to take more or less pleasure in seeing a neighbor's character improved under a course of moderately painful discipline.

At Bartlett word came that the passenger car would go no further, but that a freight train would soon start, on which, if I chose, I could continue my journey. Accordingly, I rode up through

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