In his "Capriccios" Goya stands revealed as a figure without even a forerunner in the history of art. Satirical representations of popular superstitions, bitter, mordant attacks on the aristocracy, the government, and all social conditions, unprecedented assaults on the crown, on religion and its doctrines, inexorable satires upon the Inquisition and the monastic orders, make up this most remarkable book. It had hardly appeared in 1796 before the Inquisition seized it. Goya parried this stroke, however, by dedicating the plates to the king. A painter and a colorist, in this book he displays his genius as an etcher. The outlines are drawn with light and genial strokes only; then comes the _aquatinta_, the colouring which overspreads the background, and gives localisation, depth, and light. A few scratches of the needle, a black spot, a light produced by a spot of white ingeniously left blank--that sufficed to give life and character to his figures. [Illustration: GOYA. LINDA MAESTRA! _From "Los Capriccios."_] The "Misères de la Guerre" are intrinsically more serious. All the scenes of terror that occurred in Spain as a sequel to the French invasion and the glory of Napoleon here utter their cry of lamentation. A few plates amongst them are worthy of comparison with the finest of Rembrandt's,--the sole classic for whom Goya cherished a veneration. All the undertakings which followed these--the "Bull-fights," the "Proverbs," the "Captives," the fantastic landscapes--tell of a long study of the great Dutch master. Especially celebrated were the seventeen new plates which he added to the "Malheurs de la Guerre" in 1814, at the time of the restoration of Ferdinand VII. They are the political and philosophical testament of the old liberal, the keen free-thinker, the last and utmost fight for all that he loved against all that he hated. With sacred wrath and biting irony he waged war against the intrigues and hypocrisy of the obscurantists who throttle progress and suppress freedom of thought. With passionate wrath he rushed upon kings, priests, and dignitaries. It seems incredible that the plate entitled "Nada"--a dead man, who comes out of his grave and writes with his corpse-fingers the word "Nada" (nothing)--that this plate can be the work of a Spaniard of the eighteenth century. Everywhere there is the same hatred of tyranny, of social injustice, of human stupidity, the same incredulous effort after a dimly conceived ideal of truth and liberty.