The religious school of Spanish painting reached its acmé in Murillo; and, at the risk of being accounted heterodox, we must, in summing up his merits, express our difference from Mr Stirling in one respect, and decline to rank the great Sevillian after any of the Italian masters. Few of Murillo's drawings are known to be in existence. Mr Stirling gives a list of such as he has been able to discover, nearly all of which are at the Louvre. We believe, in addition to those possessed by the British Museum and Mr Ford, there are two in the collection at Belvoir Castle: one, a Virgin and Child; the other, an old man--possibly St Francis--receiving a flower from a naked child. After Velasquez and Murillo, it may seem almost impertinent to talk of the merits of other Spanish painters; yet Zurbaran and Cano, Ribera and Coello, demand at least a passing notice. Francisco de Zurbaran, often called the Caravaggio of Spain, was born in Estremadura in 1598. His father, observing his turn for painting, sent him to the school of Roelas, at Seville. Here, for nearly a quarter of a century, he continued painting for the magnificent cathedral, and the churches and religious houses of that fair city. About 1625, he painted, for the college of St Thomas Aquinas, an altar-piece, regarded by all judges as the finest of all his works. It represents the angelic doctor ascending into the heavens, where, on clouds of glory, the blessed Trinity and the Virgin wait to receive him; below, in mid air, sit the four doctors of the Church; and on the ground are kneeling the Emperor Charles V., with the founder of the college, Archbishop Diego de Deza, and a train of ecclesiastics. Mr Stirling says of this singular picture, "The colouring throughout is rich and effective, and worthy the school of Roelas; the heads are all of them admirable studies; the draperies of the doctors and ecclesiastics are magnificent in breadth and amplitude of fold; the imperial mantle is painted with Venetian splendour; and the street view, receding in the centre of the canvass, is admirable for its atmospheric depth and distance."--(Vol. ii. p. 770.) In 1650, Philip IV. invited him to Madrid, and commanded him to paint ten pictures, representing the labours of Hercules, for a room at Buen-retiro. Almost numberless were the productions of his facile pencil, which, however, chiefly delighted to represent, the legends of the Carthusian cloister, and portray the gloomy features and sombre vestments of monks and friars; yet those who have seen his picture of the Virgin with the Infant Saviour and St John, at Stafford House, will agree with Mr Stirling that, "unrivalled in such subjects of dark fanaticism, Zurbaran could also do ample justice to the purest and most lovely of sacred themes."--(Vol. 11. p. 775)