Already he had painted two pictures, the ‘Dos de Mayo’ and ‘Un Episodio de la Invasión Francesca.’ One has only to study these two pictures of realised terror, in the Prado, to understand the painter’s hatred of the French and the brooding melancholy which the events of the rising in Madrid had fastened upon his soul and darkened his life. De Amicis, the Italian author, writes, with a fine appreciation of the stirring realism of these works: ‘Nothing more tremendous can be imagined: one can give no more execrable form to power, nor frightful aspect to desperation, nor a more ferocious expression to the fury of a fray. In the first one there is a dark sky, the light of a lantern, a pool of blood, a pile of bodies, a crowd of men condemned to death, and a line of French soldiers in the act of firing; in the other are horses with their veins cut, and horsemen dragged from their saddles, stabbed, trodden upon, and lacerated. What faces! What attitudes! One seems to hear the cries and see the blood running: the veritable scene could not cause more horror. Goya must have painted these pictures with his eyes glaring, foam at his mouth, and with the fury of a demoniac; it is the last point which painting can reach before being translated into action; having passed that point one throws away the brush and seizes the dagger; one must commit murder in order to do anything more terrible than those pictures; after those colours, comes blood.’ Goya retired to the seclusion of his house outside the gates of the capital, only opening his doors to a few old friends, among whom were Cean Bermudez the art critic, Carnicero the illustrator of _Don Quixote_, Castillo the painter, and Selma the engraver. The old painter had become completely deaf, and, in these dark days of change and violence, the bitterness of his spirit found further expression in the ‘Desastres de la Guerra’--‘the cry of a just soul against the iniquity of warfare.’ With passionate vigour he depicted the horrors of the French invasion and lashed with his satire the barbarities of the conquerors. The new series was begun in the year 1810. They reproduce all the sad and abominable events which had culminated in the accession of Joseph Bonaparte. Callot, in his scenes of the barbarities of the Thirty Years’ War, did not attain the fire, the power, or the purpose of these plates. All the horrors of warfare and its heroism and the stupidity of war are depicted here with searching truth. The technique of the plates is unsurpassed. We see starving men made bestial with terror, dead bodies stripped and mutilated, women outraged, and children butchered before the eyes of their frenzied mothers. And again we are shown the superb heroism of the women who, armed only with hatchets and stones, withstood the onslaught of the dragoons; we are made to realise the intrepid loyalty of those men and women who fought side by side on the terrible Dos de Mayo; we witness the masculine daring of the women