Another man of Portuguese birth has won immortality outside of literature; yet there is ground for thinking that DIEGO RODRÍGUEZ DE SILVA Y VELÁZQUEZ (1599-1660) had the sense for language as for paint. His _Memoria de las Pinturas_ (1658) exists in an unique copy published at Rome under the name of his pupil, Juan de Alfaro, though its substance is unscrupulously embodied in Francisco de los Santos' _Descripción Breve_ of the Escorial. Formally, it is a catalogue; substantially, it expresses the artist's judgment on his great predecessors. Thus, of Paolo Veronese's _Wedding Feast_ he writes:—"There are admirable heads, and almost all of them seem portraits. Not that of the Virgin: she has more reserve, more divinity: though very beautiful, she corresponds fittingly to the age of Christ, who is beside her—a point which most artists overlook, for they paint Christ as a man, and His Mother as a girl." The great realist speaks once more in describing Veronese's _Purification_:—"The Virgin kneels ... holding on a white cloth the Child—naked, beautiful, and tender—with a restlessness so suited to his age that He seems more a piece of living flesh than something painted." And, in the same spirit, he writes of Tintoretto's _Washing of the Feet_:—"It is hard to believe that one is looking at a painting. Such is the truth of colour, such the exactness of perspective, that one might think to go in and walk on the pavement, tessellated with stones of divers colours, which, diminishing in size, make the room seem larger, and lead you to believe that there is atmosphere between each figure. The table, seats (and a dog which is worked in) are truth, not paint.... Once for all, any picture placed beside it looks like something expressed in terms of colour, and this seems all the truer." Strangely enough, this writing of Velázquez is ignored by most, perhaps by all, of his biographers; yet it deserves a passing reference as a model of energetic expression in a time when most professional men of letters were Gongorists or _conceptistas_.