touches becomes pure, elevated and ennobled, and from this revolting theme Murillo has created a masterpiece.” This begs the question which still remains:--Is the reality in this case so rendered, that it becomes “pure, elevated and ennobled”? The answer will depend upon the individual student’s temperament and intellectual attitude. This picture, indeed, and many others in the Prado arouse a suspicion which becomes more pronounced, when we visit the Museum and the Church of the Hospital de La Caridad in Seville, that, after all, Murillo was not so great a naturalist as he is credited with being. His Street urchins, such as appear in the National Gallery, Dulwich Gallery and the Munich Pinakothek are vigorous transcripts of nature, racy with Sevillian character; but in the _Holy Family_, called _Pajarito_ (little bird) of the Prado, one discovers already a weakening of the naturalistic grip. The types are local, and the scene, as the mother stops in the winding of her thread to watch the child playing with a dog, while the father holds him tenderly, is such as might be enacted in any happy home of the people. But why the voluminous yellow mantle spread in graceful folds over Joseph’s knees? It is a recollection of Raphael that has inspired this solecism in the everyday naturalness of the scene. Similarly, in one picture after another of Murillo’s you can find the realities of the scene sacrificed to the picture-making devices learned from the Italians. Frequently, as in the _Vision of S. Antony of Padua_, and corresponding subjects, the miraculous nature of the incident gives a plausibility to these formal designs, which I venture to believe is lacking in the _S. Elizabeth_, _Loaves and Fishes_ and _Striking the Rock_. Nor is much of the nobility of the Italian method reproduced in Murillo’s use of it. Too frequently its stateliness is invaded by a homeliness which borders on the commonplace. One finds little or nothing of the aristocrat in Murillo’s equipment. He views his subject with the naiveté of an untutored mind and represents it with a simple disregard of anything that might lift it above the commonplace. And this is practically as true of his technique as of his mental approach. There are beautiful passages of color scattered through his works; fine rendering of textures, and precious _morceaux_ of still-life. But his color-schemes are regulated by temperament rather than by knowledge and calculation; his brush-work is rarely distinguished and his chiaroscuro frequently has grown blackened with time. It would be impossible to view one of his acknowledged masterpieces beside even a work of secondary interest by Velasquez, without realising at once the hopelessly unbridgeable gulf both of mentality and execution that separates them.