But Goya’s artistic output showed no signs of falling off either in quality or amount, and his marvellous rapidity of workmanship enabled him to produce an almost incredible number of canvases. In a biography and review of this size and scope it is not possible to present a leisured review of his pictures. We must be content with a brief notice of the more important among them, but the illustrations at the end of the volume which are produced in such wealth, and which constitute the chief interest of this book, will speak more eloquently than words. Of Goya’s methods of painting many stories are told, from which it might be concluded that he employed for the purpose every instrument known to art with the solitary exception of a brush. Gautier, who declared his mode to be as eccentric as his talent, has exhausted all the facts and legends relating to his brush-work (if so it can be called) in the following vivacious descriptive passage: ‘He kept his colours in tubs, and applied them to the canvas by means of sponges, brooms, rags, and everything that happened to be within his reach. He put on his tones with a trowel, as it were, exactly like so much mortar, and painted touches of sentiment with large daubs of his thumb. From the fact of his working in this offhand and expeditious manner, he would cover some thirty feet of wall in a couple of days. This method certainly appears somewhat to exceed even the licence accorded to the most impetuous and fiery genius; the most dashing painters are but children compared to him. He executed, with a spoon for a brush, a painting of the “Dos de Mayo,” where some French troops are shooting a number of Spaniards. It is a work of incredible vigour and fire.’