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 desirotis 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.”