“You are quite right,” said Mr. Montenero; “it is inferior to Murillo, and the sudden sense of this inferiority absolutely broke the painter’s heart. This picture is by a painter of the name of Castillo, who had thought comfortably well of himself, till he saw the master-pieces of Murillo’s genius; Castillo surveyed them for some time in absolute silence, then turning away, exclaimed _Castillo is no more!_ and soon Castillo was no more. From that moment he pined away, and shortly afterwards died: not from envy,” continued Mr. Montenero; “no, he was a man of mild, amiable temper, incapable of envy; but he fell a victim to excessive sensibility--a dangerous, though not a common vice of character.” “Weakness, not vice, I hope,” I heard Miss Montenero say in a low voice. The father answered with a sigh, “_that_, however, cannot be called a virtue, which incapacitates from the exercise of independent virtue, and which, as you find, not only depresses genius, but may extinguish life itself.” Mr. Montenero then turned to me, and with composure went on speaking of the pictures. Ever since I knew I was to see these, I had been studying Cumberland’s Lives of the Spanish Painters, and this I honestly told Mr. Montenero, when he complimented me upon my knowing all the names and anecdotes to which he alluded: he smiled--so did his daughter; and he was so good as to say that he liked me better for telling him this so candidly, than if I had known all that the connoisseurs and anecdote-mongers, living or dead, had ever said or written. We came to a picture by Alonzo Cano, who, excelling in architecture, statuary, and painting, has been called the Michael Angelo of Spain. “He at least was not deficient in a comfortably good opinion of himself, Mr. Montenero,” said I. “Is not it recorded of Cano, that having finished a statue of Saint Antonio de Padua for a Spanish counsellor, the tasteless lawyer and niggardly devotee hesitated to pay the artist his price, observing that Cano, by his own account, had been only twenty-five days about it? The counsellor sat down, with stupid self-sufficiency, to calculate, that at a hundred pistoles, divided by twenty-five days, the artist would be paid at a higher rate than he was himself for the exercise of his talents. ‘Wretch! talk to me of your talents!’ exclaimed the enraged artist; ‘I have been fifty years learning to make this statue in twenty-five days!’ And as he spoke, Cano dashed his statue to pieces on the pavement of the academy. The affrighted counsellor fled from the house with the utmost precipitation, concluding that the man who was bold enough to destroy a saint, would have very little remorse in destroying a lawyer. “Happily for Cano, this story did not reach the ears of the Inquisition,” said Mr. Montenero, “or he would have been burnt alive.”