And his third stage was a fevered expression of his imaginative vision. We have entered a new world of extraordinary restlessness, the restlessness that must exist when spirit struggles from the bonds of the flesh. Toledo, the ardent arid city, burnt fiercely in El Greco’s blood, and, more and more, he seems to have felt that it was not enough to record facts; to have cared less to give æsthetic pleasure; but that the object of his art should be to clothe abstract ideas with life. It is something of all this that we find in his later pictures. In each there is emphasis--or, if you like, exaggeration--of statement; in the ‘Coronation of the Virgin’ in San José, for instance, a picture that in a strange, left-handed way carries us forward to the picture by Velazquez[H] on the same subject. The exaggeration is equally visible in the ‘Assumption’ in San Vicente, more beautiful, and the most interesting of these rare visions, a picture in which we have movement--the very sensation of a figure passing through the air as we have, perhaps, in no other picture. It is even stronger in the group of pictures in Madrid, the ‘Baptism,’ the ‘Descent of the Holy Spirit,’ the ‘Resurrection,’ and the ‘Christ Dead in the Arms of God’; it meets us again in the ‘St. Joseph with the Child Jesus,’ and in the ‘Virgin and Child with Saints Justa and Gertrude,’[I] both in San José, the church that is the museum of so much of the master’s work--pictures all similar in their intense sentiment; while emphasis burns to a white flame of ardent expression in the famed ‘St. John the Baptist,’ the wonderful picture of which we have spoken already. It is there, too, in the ‘Christ Crucified,’ one in the Prado, one in San Nicolas, surely the most terrible realisation possible of that scene of sacrifice, in which the agony of spirit so outweighs the agony of the flesh, and sky and earth seem to take their share in the struggle.