handles again and again motives derived from what happens to be the mode in colours renders no service to art. Delaroche is dead; but though he may be disinterred he cannot be brought to life, and the Spaniards merely dug out of the earth mummies in which the breath of life was wanting. Their works are not directing-posts to the future, but the last _revenants_ of that histrionic spirit which wandered like a ghost through the art of all nations. Even the composition, the shining colours, the settles and carpets picturesquely spread upon the ground, are the same as in Gallait. How often have these precious stage properties done duty in tragic funereal service since Delaroche's "Murder of the Duke of Guise" and Piloty's "Seni"! [Illustration: _Hanfstaengl._ PRADILLA. THE SURRENDER OF GRANADA.] [Illustration: _Kunst unserer Zeit._ PRADILLA. ON THE BEACH.] And these conceptions, nourished upon historical painting, had an injurious influence upon the handling of the modern picture of the period. Even here there is an endeavour to make a compromise with the traditional historic picture, since artists painted scenes from modern popular life upon great spaces of canvas, transforming them into pageants or pictures of tragical ceremonies, and sought too much after subjects with which the splendid and motley colours of historical painting would accord. _Viniegra y Lasso_ and _Mas y Fondevilla_ execute great processions filing past, with bishops, monks, priests, and choristers. All the figures stand beaming in brightness against the sky, but the light glances from the oily mantles of the figures without real effect. _Alcazar Tejedor_ paints a young priest reading his "First Mass" in the presence of his parents, and merely renders a theatrical scene in modern costume, merely transfers to an event of the present that familiar "moment of highest excitement" so popular since the time of Delaroche. By his "Death of the Matador," and "The Christening," bought by Vanderbilt for a hundred and fifty thousand francs, _José Villegas_, in ability the most striking of them all, acquired a European name; whilst a hospital scene by _Luis Jimenez_ of Seville is the single picture in which something of the seriousness of French Naturalism is perceptible, but it is an isolated example from a province of interest which is otherwise not to be found in Spain. [Illustration: VILLEGAS. DEATH OF THE MATADOR.]