dark dress, perhaps the son of the Count; beyond rises the stately form of a gray friar; to the left, near St Augustine, stand two priests in gorgeous vestments, holding, the one a book, and the other a taper. Behind this principal group appear the noble company of mourners, hidalgos and old Christians all, with olive faces and beards of formal cut, looking on with true Castilian gravity and phlegm, as if the transaction were an every-day occurrence. As they were mostly portraits, perhaps some of the originals did actually stand, a few years later, with the like awe in their hearts and calm on their cheeks, in the royal presence-chamber, when the news came to court that the proud Armada of Spain had been vanquished by the galleys of Howard, and cast away on the rocks of the Hebrides." We make no apology for thus freely quoting from Mr Stirling's pages his description of this picture; the extract brings vividly before our readers at once the merits of the old Toledan painter, and his accomplished biographer and critic. After embellishing his adopted city, not only with pictures such as this, but with works of sculpture and architecture, and vindicating his graceful profession from the unsparing exactions of the tax-gatherers--a class who appear to have waged an unrelenting though intermittent war against the fine arts in Spain--he died there at a green old age in 1625, and was buried in the church of St Bartolemé. Even the painters most employed at the munificent and art-loving court of the second and third Philips, found time to paint for the venerable cathedral. Thus, in 1615, Vincencio Carducho, the Florentine, painted, with Eugenio Caxes, a series of frescoes in the chapel of the Sagrario; and thus Eugenio Caxes, leaving the works at the Pardo and Madrid, painted for the cathedral of Toledo the Adoration of the Magi, and other independent pictures.