perfection if he could have studied for a time in Rome. The first works done by Murillo after his return to Seville in 1645 were the pictures of the convent of San Francisco. The building was destroyed by fire in 1810, but several of the paintings are now in the collection of Marshal Soult. In the pictures of San Francisco, Cean Bermudez recognises an imitation of Vandyck, Ribera, and Velasquez, the three painters whom Murillo chiefly studied while at Madrid. His new works excited general attention; so little had he been known before he left Seville, and so studious and retired had been his habits, that his absence had scarcely been noticed, and his re-appearance with so masterly a style of painting astonished his fellow-citizens. The fame of Herrera, Pacheco, and Zurbaran, was at once eclipsed, and he was universally acknowledged the first painter of the Sevillian School. The obscurity in which he had lived before his visit to Madrid was now exchanged for the most flattering attentions of the powerful and wealthy, and many of the chief citizens wished to have their portraits done by him. Meanwhile he painted the Flight into Egypt, in the church de la Merced, which has been attributed to Velasquez, and other works now no longer in Spain. In 1648, he married Doña Beatriz de Cabrera y Sotomayor, a lady of birth and some fortune, a native of Pilas, from which circumstance, perhaps, originated the mistake of Palomino in assigning that town as the birth-place of her husband. A change in his manner of painting, adopted, as Cean Bermudez asserts, to please the public, is observable soon after this period. It succeeded in pleasing all parties, for the new manner was extolled even by the warmest admirers of the previous performances of the master. The works of Murillo may be divided into three distinct styles: the first, necessarily very different from his subsequent manner, is to be sought in the specimens which date before his departure for Madrid; the second, is that which he acquired in the capital, and is exemplified by the works above-mentioned, done immediately after his return; the third manner dates from about 1650, and the first public work which may be cited as illustrating it, is an Immaculate Conception (a subject often treated by the Spanish painters) in the convent of San Francisco, painted in 1652.