In another hall I found a picture of great merit, unmentioned by the guide-book, and by a painter unknown to me even by name before. It is a Virgin and Child, with four venerable saints kneeling before them. The artist is Bias del Prado. Few pictures in any gallery deserve more admiration than this. The heads of the old men are done with great power, and the thoughtful feeling in the face of the Virgin shows that the artist had both the genius to conceive, and the skill to create, an idea on the canvas, quite equal to the best of many others who have won a world-wide fame. And scattered through these long apartments, in narrow halls and basement rooms, in bad lights, and some almost in the dark, are many gems of rare value, “blushing unseen,” and worth a better place, and deserving wider renown. It would be tedious to read even a brief mention of the celebrated pictures of the famous old masters here, and that form so large a part of the attractions of Europe. There are very few minor galleries in Madrid. Probably there has been a lack both of private wealth and taste to make collections. In one of these we found Murillo’s “Queen Isabel of Hungary healing the Lepers,” a picture that would be admired as one of his greatest and best, if it were not so true to life as to make one almost sick to look at it. But this is the height of the highest art. Birds have been deceived by painted fruit. Bees have sought honey in flowers on the walls. And perhaps this cheating of the senses, even to disgust, is the perfection of human skill. But the imitation of the _material_ is easy. If portrait painting were merely the reproduction of the form and features, it is the lowest department of the art. But to conceive the expression that belongs to the character of a saint, a prophet, a hero, a sibyl, a Madonna, and thus to create an ideal that will demonstrate its reality and truthfulness to an unbelieving or indifferent world, challenging admiration and asserting its own immortality, this is the attribute of genius only, and such is not the birth of every day or age. CHAPTER VI. TOLEDO—ITS FLEAS, LANDLORDS, ANTIQUITIES, AND LUNATICS.