A painter had a penance inflicted on him at Cordova, for painting the Virgin at the foot of the Cross in a hooped petticoat, pointed boddice, and a saffron-colored head-dress; St. John had pantaloons, and a doublet with points. This chastisement Pacheco considers richly deserved. Don Luis Pasqual also erred greatly, in his Marriage of the Virgin, representing her without any mantle, in a Venetian petticoat, fitting very close in the waist, covered with knots of colored ribbon, and with wide round sleeves,--“a dress,” adds Pacheco, “in my opinion highly unbecoming the gravity and dignity of our Sovereign Lady.” Nor were there wanting awful examples of warning to painters, as in the story related by Martin de Roa, in his _State of Souls in Purgatory_. “A painter,” so runs the legend, “had executed in youth, at the request of a gentleman, an improper picture. After the painter’s death, this picture was laid to his charge, and it was only by the intercession of those Saints whom he had at various times painted, that he got off with severe torments in Purgatory. Whilst there, however, he contrived to appear to his confessor, and prevailed upon him to go to the gentleman for whom this picture was painted, and entreat him to burn it. The request was complied with, and the painter then got out of Purgatory!” The author cannot close this too lengthy article without citing the Life of the Virgin written by Maria de Agreda, whose absurd and blasphemous vagaries were “swallowed whole” by the Spanish nation--an unanswerable proof and a fitting result of the blight inflicted by Jesuitism and the Inquisition. Bayle says, “the only wonder is, that the Sorbonne confined itself to saying that her proposition was false, rash, and contrary to the doctrines of the Gospel, when she taught that God gave the Virgin all he could, and that he could give her all his own attributes, except the essence of the Godhead.” The condemnation of Maria de Agreda’s Life of the Virgin was not carried in the Sorbonne without the greatest opposition and tumult. The book was censured at Rome, notwithstanding all the efforts of the Spanish ambassador. The Spanish feeling, with reference to the Virgin, and more particularly to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, went far beyond the rest of Papal Europe; it was impossible for the Pope and the French Church to sanction at once the absurdities that Spain was quite ready to adopt. (See Sir Edmund Head’s Hand-Book of the History of the Spanish and French Schools of Painting.) A MELANCHOLY PICTURE OF THE STATE OF THE FINE ARTS IN SPAIN.