of Spanish conquest; Ferdinand, the prisoner of Valençay,--who had danced in captivity while his country bled, who still sought a marital alliance with the house of Buonaparte, who had slobbered his felicitations on the birth of the King of Rome and congratulated the Emperor upon his victory over the Spaniards--Ferdinand was now free to receive the welcome which his loyal countrymen were eager to give him. Ferdinand ‘the desired,’ after swearing to respect the new constitution, re-entered Spain in March 1814 amidst an incredible outburst of popular enthusiasm. Two days before he reached Madrid every member of the Cortes and every known friend of the constitution was thrown into prison. By the publication of the decree of Valencia he proclaimed himself an autocrat, by his acts he proved himself a tyrant. He re-established the Inquisition, he decreed the ancient taxes; the country, desolated by war waged on his behalf, was thrown into lamentable disorder by the greed of the coarse and ignorant bloodsuckers whom the King gathered around him. Charles IV. was a paternal sovereign, and Joseph I. was an enlightened ruler beside Ferdinand VII. Neither Liberals nor Conservatives were safe. He imprisoned the men who had striven and bled to effect his return; he persecuted without mercy those who had sworn allegiance to Joseph. Goya was one of the first and fiercest, according to Lafond, to acclaim the return of the King. For a time he sought refuge from his sovereign in the house of his friend José Duaso y Latre, who kept him in hiding for three months. At the expiration of that time he found that Ferdinand was inclined to condone his defection. It is reported that he pardoned him with the words, ‘In our absence you have deserved exile, nay worse, you have merited death; but you are a great artist, and we will forget everything.’ So ‘the good old Goya’ was reinstated as Court painter, and he executed several portraits of the new sovereign. It is evident from these likenesses that the painter recognised the weakness and worthlessness of Ferdinand. He viewed his sitter in the same clear, critical, uncompromising spirit with which he had gazed on his royal parents; he painted the weak, shifty, uncultured despot as he was. The equestrian portrait of Ferdinand VII. is commonplace. His portrait of the monarch in his gorgeous mantle is almost a caricature of royalty, and in his other likenesses he betrays his antipathy to the restored Bourbon. That Goya’s palette still emitted ‘rays of prodigious art’ when he painted people who were congenial to him, is shown by many of the portraits of this period; for instance, by that of the Marquis de San Adrián, of Don Ignacio Garcini and his wife, of Don Evaristo Pérez de Castro, and by the beautiful study of Goya’s little niece, La Felicianæ, which is one of the tenderest and most delicate of all his portraits.