The merits of Velasquez are now generally appreciated in England; and the popular voice would, we think, ratify the enthusiastic yet sober dictum of Wilkie, "In painting an intelligent portrait he is nearly unrivalled." Yet we have seen how he could rise to the highest subject of mortal imagination in the Crucifixion; and the one solitary naked Venus, which Spanish art in four hundred years produced, is his. Mr Stirling, though he mentions this picture in the body of his book, assigns it no place in his valuable and laboriously compiled catalogue, probably because he was unable to trace its later adventures. Brought to England in 1814, and sold for £500 to Mr Morritt, it still remains the gem of the library at Rokeby. Long may the Spanish queen of love preside over the beautiful bowers of that now classic retreat! We sum up our notice of Velasquez in Mr Stirling's words:--"No artist ever followed nature with more catholic fidelity; his cavaliers are as natural as his boors; he neither refined the vulgar, nor vulgarised the refined.... We know the persons of Philip IV. and Olivarez as familiarly as if we had paced the avenues of the Pardo with Digby and Howell, and perhaps we think more favourably of their characters. In the portraits of the monarch and the minister, 'The bounding steeds they pompously bestride, Share with their lords the pleasure and the pride,' and enable us to judge of the Cordovese horse of that day, as accurately as if we had lived with the horse-breeding Carthusians of the Betis. And this painter of kings and horses has been compared, as a painter of landscapes, to Claude; as a painter of low life, to Teniers: his fruit-pieces equal those of Sanchez Cotan or Van Kessel; his poultry might contest the prize with the fowls of Hondekooter on their own dunghill; and his dogs might do battle with the dogs of Sneyders."--(Vol. ii. p. 686.)