It is one thing to admire, even to understand, the technique of the ‘Caprichos,’ but to understand the precise significance of many of the plates is almost impossible. Perhaps the titles printed by Goya beneath the plates are the best guide to their meaning. The only reward to be derived from reading ingenious meanings into the prints is the personal interest one finds in the exercise. The series may be divided into three classes; the first are humorous satires of the foolishness and rottenness of the life of the period; the second are scathing assaults upon the ignorance and greed of the priesthood and the corruptness of the civic institutions; and the last are visions of witches and demons, which may be classed as pure phantasies. There is a depth of meaning in every plate, for Goya reproduces for us in them not only what he has seen, but what he has felt. The first plate illustrates a marriage of convenience, and we are shown the girl-bride being presented to her hideous suitor by her more hideous mother. Over and over again we are presented with this type of the ‘complaisant mother,’ which has been described by Théophile Gautier in illuminating prose. ‘It is impossible’ he writes, ‘to fancy anything more grotesquely horrible, more viciously deformed. Each of these frightful old shrews unites in her own person the ugliness of the seven capital sins; compared to them the Prince of Darkness himself is pretty. Just fancy whole ditches and counterscarps of wrinkles; eyes like live coals that have been extinguished in blood; noses like the neck of an alembic covered with warts and other excrescences; nostrils like those of an hippopotamus rendered formidable by stiff bristles; whiskers like a tiger’s; a mouth like the slit in the top of a money-box, contracted by a horrible and convulsive grin; a something between the spider and the multiped which makes you feel the same kind of disgust as if you had placed your foot upon the belly of a toad.’ The description is horrible even as Goya’s engravings are horrible, and as excellently true as the work by which it was inspired.