vanity of the Count-Duke of Olivarez, painted his portrait in a suit which was not his own.... Goya painted moral life hyperbolically idealised in his effigies of the kings, because he was painter to the Household and protected by the Crown and the Court, although he was rather the protector of his protectors. In all the other portraits of statesmen, politicians, literati, scientific men, actors, bull-fighters, priests and artists, Goya harmonised exactly the body and the mind. How marvellously he caught the faces of the men of great minds! How beautifully the moral and intellectual qualities of the person represented are shown!’ A second and more cautious reading of the foregoing passage was required to convince us that it was written without sarcasm, and was meant to express a sober estimate of the qualities which the writer discovered in the pictures referred to. Personal taste, as we have remarked elsewhere, counts for much in the whole field of art, and in the opinion which is quoted the Conde de la Viñaza has the field practically to himself. Nearly all Goya’s critics and admirers are united in their appreciation of the merciless and remorseless frankness, the pitiless satire, the mocking, saturnine faithfulness of the likenesses. Sir William Stirling-Maxwell misses the point of the equestrian portrait of Charles IV. when he remarks that ‘the poor imbecile king, in the blue uniform and cocked hat of a colonel of the guards, mounted on a sober brown charger,’ is ‘an example of the dignity which may be conferred, by a skilful hand, on the most ordinary features and expression, without sacrificing the resemblance.’ But who beside Viñaza and Stirling-Maxwell could detect anything but a burlesque of kingly dignity in this grandly-uniformed, coarsely-made and coarse-faced Bourbon who sits ‘asthmatic and fat, upon his fat asthmatic horse, with his fat asthmatic dog’--a study which moves a German critic to remark, ‘How like a Moloch he appears, an evil god who has battened upon the life-blood of his people.’