In his oil paintings he went much further in this direction. In that impetuous manner peculiar to him he endeavoured to get a firm grip on the pictorial side of Spanish life, at home and in the streets, wherever he found it. The most fearful subjects--such as the two great slaughter scenes in the French invasion, painted with such breadth and fierceness--alternate with incidents of the liveliest character. Everything is jotted down, under the immediate influence of what has been observed, by rapid methods, and on this account produces an effect of sketches taken with complete directness from nature. In those careless pictures, swept with large strokes of the brush, there rises before us the mad drama of public holiday in the streets and in the circus: processions, bull-fights, brigands, the victims of the plague, assassinations, scenes of gallantry, national types--all observed with the acuteness of a Menzel. The Majas on the balcony in the Montpensier Gallery, the "Breakfast on the Grass," the "Flower Girl," the "Reaper," the "Return from Market," the "Cart attacked by Brigands," are the most piquant, vividly coloured of these pictures. The "Romeria de San Isidoro" is full of such a sparkling, stirring life as the most modern of the impressionists alone have learned again to paint. A few dashes of colour, a few well-placed, bold strokes of the brush, and at once one sees the procession move, the groups passing each other by just as, in the marvellous sketches of the funeral of Sardina, in the Academy of San Fernando, one can see the young couples revolve madly in the dance, and the lances of the bull-fighters redden the sand of the arena. The superabundance of such phantasy could not, of course, be achieved by the tardy brush. He required a quicker medium, that would permit him to express everything. Therefore he executed his numerous etchings, by which he was rendered famous, before people had learnt to appreciate him as a painter: the "Capriccios," the "Malheurs de la Guerre," the "Bull-fights," the "Captives"--those marvellous and fantastic pages in which he expressed everything that his feverish, satirical soul had accumulated for contempt, and hatred, and anger, and scorn. The etcher's needle was the poisoned dagger with which he attacked all that he wished to attack: tyranny, superstition, intrigue, adultery, honour that is sold and beauty that lets itself be bought, the arrogance of the great and the degrading servility of the little. He made an awful and jovial hecatomb of all the vices and the scandals of the age. Whomsoever he pilloried was laid bare in all respects; physically and morally, no single trait of him was forgotten. And he did it so wittily that he compelled even the offended person to laugh. Neither Charles IV himself, nor the Court, nor the Inquisition, which bled most beneath his thrusts, dared to complain. [Illustration: GOYA. QUIEN LO CREYERA! _From "Los Capriccios."_]