Still more charming was he in his pictures of young girls, when he was himself fascinated by the attractions of his subjects. The infantile Donna Maria Josefa (at the Prado) and the twelve-year-old Queen Isabella of Sicily (at Seville) are admirable pictures. In them the candour and grace of budding youth, the whole poetry of young maidenhood, have won life and expression from the enamoured tenderness of an artist hand. Seduced by beauty, he renounced all irony, thought only of those big, wide-opened eyes of velvet, those rosy young lips; of that warm carnation and the elegant slimness of that soft young neck that rose in delicate contour from the shoulders. Or again, that marvellous double portrait of La Maja in the Academy of San Fernando: a young girl painted once clothed and once nude, both pictures in exactly the same pose, and both flooded with the same extraordinary sensuous charm. This is not the uncertain, sarcastic painter of those State pictures. It is an attentive observer, who depicts with sensitive devotion the harmonious lines of the irradiating, young, human body so worthy of celebration. The transparent stuff that covers the body of "La Maja clothed" reveals all that it hides; in the other picture the unveiled nudity sings the high pæan of the flesh. The drawing is sure, the modelling of a marvellous tenderness. The heaving bosom, the slender limbs, the tantalising eyes--every part of that nervous body, with its ivory whiteness, stretched out on the milk-white couch made for love, breathes of pleasure and voluptuousness. In pictures of this kind Goya is wholly one of us. Grown independent of every traditional rule, he abandoned himself entirely to his own impressions, and produced enduring works, vibrating with life, because he was himself fascinated with nature. He showed here an idea of modernity that almost makes him seem a contemporary of our own--that zeal for the pictorial, for colour and light, which attracts us so much to-day. Very characteristic also of the changed aspect of the age are his designs for the famous tapestry in Santa Barbara, with which he made his début at Madrid. They are very crude in decoration. Two or three neat young girls, with big, black, moist eyes, here and there pleasing details--a couple of men carrying a wounded companion--are unable to gloss over the heaviness of the composition and colour. But it was of great consequence that Goya should have had courage for so bold a step as to make use of character scenes in decorative painting at a time when everywhere else, without exception, _fêtes champêtres_ predominated. [Illustration: GOYA. VOLAVERUNT. _From "Los Capriccios."_]