"The august figure of the Saviour, arrayed in a red robe, occupies the centre of the canvass; the head, with its long dark locks, is superb; and the noble and beautiful countenance seems to mourn for the madness of them who 'knew not what they did;' his right arm is folded on his bosom, seemingly unconscious of the rope which encircles his wrist, and is violently dragged downwards by two executioners in front. Around and behind him appears a throng of priests and warriors, amongst whom the Greek himself figures as the centurion, in black armour. In drawing and composition, this picture is truly admirable, and the colouring is, on the whole, rich and effective--although it is here and there laid on in that spotted streaky manner, which afterwards became the great and prominent defect of El Greco's style." Summoned from the cathedral to the court, El Greco painted, by royal command, a large altar-piece, for the church at the Escurial, on the martyrdom of St Maurice; "little less extravagant and atrocious," says our lively author, "than the massacre it recorded." Neither king nor court painters could praise this performance, and the effect of his failure at the Escurial appears to have been his return to Toledo. Here, in 1584, he painted, by order of the Archbishop Quiroga, "The Burial of the Count of Orgaz," a picture then and now esteemed as his master-piece, and still to be seen in the church of Santo Tomé. Warm is the encomium, and eloquently expressed, which Mr Stirling bestows upon this gem of Toledan art. "The artist, or lover of art, who has once beheld it, will never, as he rambles among the winding streets of the ancient city, pass the pretty brick belfry of that church--full of horse-shoe niches and Moorish reticulations,--without turning aside to gaze upon its superb picture once more. It hangs to your left, on the wall opposite to the high altar. Gonzalo Ruiz, Count of Orgaz, head of a house famous in romance, rebuilt the fabric of the church, and was in all respects so religious and gracious a grandee, that, when he was buried in 1323, within these very walls, St Stephen and St Augustine came down from heaven, and laid his body in the tomb with their own holy hands--an incident which forms the subject of the picture. St Stephen, a dark-haired youth of noble countenance, and St Augustine, a hoary old man wearing a mitre, both of them arrayed in rich pontifical vestments of golden tissue, support the dead Count in their arms, and gently lower him into the grave, shrouded like a baron of Roslin 'in his iron panoply.' Nothing can be finer than the execution and the contrast of these three heads; never was the image of the peaceful death of 'the just man' more happily conveyed, than in the placid face and powerless form of the warrior: nor did Giorgione or Titian ever excel the splendid colouring of his black armour, rich with gold damascening. To the right of the picture, behind St Stephen, kneels a fair boy in a