It is a question often asked, and never answered, Why can we not have these pictures, or such as these, in the Western World? Few of the many who would enjoy and appreciate them ever can come to Spain or Italy, and must they live and die without the sight of all these glorious works of art? It would be an easy matter to have copies made of the most celebrated and magnificent pictures, and transported to New York, into a national gallery. Copies may be made so as to challenge comparison with the original, and to give a fair idea of the distinctive manner of each of the artists. It does not require the same genius to make a perfect copy that it does to conceive and give birth to the original. And there are no living artists, and have been none in the last three hundred years, to paint character, soul, thought, feeling, as those men did whom we call the Old Masters. We have as great painters now as they. But not in their line of things. England and France and America have had, and now have, artists whose works could not have been produced by Da Vinci, Giotto, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Titian, Carlo Dolce, or Murillo. But there is no one alive now to paint the Last Supper, the Judgment, the Transfiguration, the Charles V. on horseback, or the Smitten Rock, comparable with those majestic transcripts of sentiment which stand up in the world of art among man’s works, as Niagara and Mont Blanc are sublime among the works of God. After writing the account of the bull-fight in a former chapter, it occurred to me that you might ask whether I went to see the _sport_ myself, or relied altogether on the descriptions of the ladies and others. That is a fair question, and I am therefore obliged to say that I did not; that I have never seen a bull-fight. Three reasons prevented me from going. First, they are usually to be seen only on Sunday, and I never go to places of amusement on that day, at home or abroad. Secondly, I have no taste for sights of blood, and would rather go the other way than into the bull-ring at any time. And thirdly and lastly, in the way of reasons for not going, there was not a bull-fight while I was there! It was and is yet the winter season, when the weather is cool compared with spring and summer, and the bulls do not fight well except when the weather is hot. The “season,” which is even more distinctly marked than that of opera in Paris or New York, begins the first Sunday after Lent, and a performance takes place every Sunday afterwards, if the weather permits, till the height of summer suspends it for a few weeks when the heat is excessive. It is resumed from the latter part of August until the first of October. Then the fall and winter are made dull by its absence, and the Spaniards long for the return of hot weather and the beasts.