who took the match from the hands of the dead artillerymen and continued to work the guns. Every phase of warfare, its famine and desolation, its hunger and disease, its heroism and its savagery, are depicted in this impeachment of Militarism. The utter uselessness of war is emphasised in the haunting echo which runs through all the plates--‘To what end?’ The wasteful sacrifice of human lives is forced upon Goya’s audience by an engraving in this series inscribed with the word ‘Nada’ (Nothingness). Gautier in his rare volume, _Travels in Spain_ (so rare that I need make no apology for again quoting from it), writes of this plate: ‘Among these drawings which admit of an easy explanation, there is one fearfully terrible and mysterious, the meaning of which, that we can dimly understand, fills you with horror and affright. It is a corpse, half-buried in the earth; it is supporting itself on its elbow, and, without looking at what it is writing, traces with its bony hand, on a paper placed near it, one word--“Nothingness”--which is alone worth the most terrible things Dante ever penned. Around its head, on which there is just enough flesh left to render it more frightful than a mere skull, flit, scarcely visible in the darkness of the night, a number of monstrous spectres, lighted up here and there by flashes of vivid lightning. A fatidical hand holds a pair of scales, which are in the act of turning upside down. Can you conceive anything more sinister or more heartrending?’ The ‘Disasters’ were not published in a series until 1863, when the Academy of San Fernando acquired eighty plates and issued the engravings with a brief introductory note. In this introduction the writer says: ‘The collection which Goya designated by the name of _Ravages_ or _Disasters of War_, is indisputably one of the most notable of the kind that he produced. In it is all the strength of his lively imagination, exalted and excited by a deep patriotic feeling in those terrible moments when an unjust foreign invasion essayed to humiliate the pride and hauteur which are a characteristic of the Spaniard. What matter for surprise then that a Spaniard, an Aragonese, a man with the stern independent character of Goya, should allow himself to be carried away very often by exaggeration and caricature?... On the other hand, this work breathes novelty in the subjects, originality in the types, fire in the composition, boldness and firmness in the colouring, decision and even fineness in the design.... In order that nothing shall be lacking in this collection, there is given on each plate the inscriptions which afford another proof of the artist’s genius. These inscriptions, concise, incisive, and piquant, add character, if that be possible, to what the pencil had already accomplished; the brief phrases, at times a single word, reveal by their sense of rapidity the fugitive idea which his mind had conceived in a moment, and which, in little more than