The venerable cathedral of Toledo was, in effect, the cradle of Spanish painting. Founded in 1226 by St Ferdinand, it remained, to quote Mr Stirling's words, "for four hundred years a nucleus and gathering-place for genius, where artists swarmed and laboured like bees, and where splendid prelates--the popes of the Peninsula--lavished their princely revenues to make fair and glorious the temple of God intrusted to their care." Here Dolfin introduced, in 1418, painting on glass; here the brothers Rodrigues displayed their forceful skill as sculptors, in figures which still surmount the great portal of that magnificent cathedral; and here Rincon, the first Spanish painter who quitted the stiff mediæval style, loved best to execute his graceful works. Nor when, with the house of Austria, the genius of Spanish art quitted the Bourbon-governed land, did the custodians of this august temple forget to stimulate and reward the detestable conceits, and burlesque sublimities, of such artists as the depraved taste of the eighteenth century delighted to honour. Thus, in 1721, Narciso Tome erected at the back of the choir an immense marble altar-piece, called the Trasparente, by order of Archbishop Diego de Astorgo, for which he received two hundred thousand ducats; and thus, fifty years later, Bayeu and Maella were employed to paint in fresco the cloisters that had once gloried in the venerable paintings of Juan de Borgoña. At Toledo, then, under the auspices of the great Castilian queen, Isabella, may be said to have risen the Castilian school of art. The other great schools of Spanish painting were those of Andalusia, of Valencia, and that of Arragon and Catalonia; but, for the mass of English readers, the main interest lies in the two first, the schools that produced or acquired El Mudo and El Greco, Velasquez and Murillo. The works of the two last-mentioned artists are now so well known, and so highly appreciated in England, that we are tempted to postpone for the present any notice of that most delightful part of Sir Stirling's book which treats of them, and invite our readers to trace the course of art in that stern old city to which we have already referred, Toledo.