In this period of his greatest prosperity, Goya was courted not only for the sake of his art, but also for his personal qualities. He was popular with men, while women eagerly contended for his favour. A revolutionary, he became the friend of the King, while the Queen and the Countess of Benavente delighted in his companionship. He went from palace to palace and from fête to fête, observing, working, studying, revelling in the life by which he was surrounded and in which he played a full part. This lover of freedom could breathe in an atmosphere of corruption; this son of the soil could play the courtier with a will. ‘If we are to understand his genius rightly,’ says C. Gasquoine Hartley, in _A Record of Spanish Painting_, ‘all contradictions are solved when we realise that he was an onlooker at, rather than an operator in, many incidents of his life.’ This half-hearted attempt to condone the irregularity of his life at this period is at variance both with what we know of Goya’s temperament and with the facts. He was an actor as well as an interpreter of the scenes which he represents, and many of his pictures, which are regarded as biting satires of the follies and vice of his age, are quite as plausibly explained as the expression of personal animus and party feeling. Certain people have discovered in Goya a moralist after the style of Hogarth, using his brush in the sacred cause of morality, to expose the vices of his time, laying bare the baseness of his contemporaries in order to inspire contempt and horror of their conduct, stigmatising the habits of the court of Charles IV., and castigating the hypocrisy, ignorance, and immodesty of the men and women who surrounded the royal family. But while in the later works of his mature age he employed his brush and needle to this purpose, it is more probable, as Lafond concludes, that under Charles IV. and Maria Luisa, Goya drew and engraved, as La Fontaine wrote his fables: for the pleasure of producing them, from the necessity of multiplying them, not troubling himself about questions of morality or of the lessons which his pictures should teach. ‘The truth is,’ says his French biographer, ‘that, mixed up in the intrigues of the Court and involved in personal quarrels, he takes the part now of one, now of another, using his pen to scratch his adversaries of to-day who are his allies to-morrow.’ In all his works he imbued the subject with the quality of his thought as well as with the charm of his colour and the skill of his draughtmanship. Of all the artists of his class, says the _Boletin de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones_, none put into their studies more meaning and personal opinion. If he painted a scene he attached to it a proverb or a significant ejaculation; if he produced a portrait he left upon the likeness his opinion of his model; if in many cases it amounted to a positive caricature, he could no more help seeing his subject in that