We know that El Greco had disciples, since his two most famous, Fray Bautista Maino and Luis Tristan, were considerable artistes, whose work in Toledo is only second to his own. But had he a school such as had the great Italian masters? Was he beloved, admired, followed through the town? What was his influence upon the young men around him? Was his personality intense and commanding? Strong, yes, else he would never have dabbled in litigation. We may imagine too some intemperateness of character to explain the intemperate blemishes of his work. The strange obscurity of so successful a career as his must have been, if the most important commissions of the time mean anything, leaves us in doubt of the man's personal attractiveness. He can scarcely have formed strong friendships, or some testimony, some facts would have reached us through these. A wilful, obstinate, self-centred nature is revealed in all his works, and a curious lack of temperament and charm in it would explain to some extent the man's lack of personal magnetism and influence to account for the century's indifference to the creator of work it seems to have appreciated so thoroughly. We find him again at loggerheads with Felipe Segundo. The Escorial was built, and the morose Philip ordered El Greco to paint a picture of the martyrdom of St Maurice for the chapel. He had by this entered into his last period of accentuated eccentricity, of which the St John the Baptist of the _Hospital de Afuera_, beyond the Puerta de Visagra, is a sufficiently exasperating example. The St Maurice I have not seen, but if the saint's legs in any way resembled those of St John the Baptist, small blame to the astounded king when he refused to accept the picture. The sacristan of the _Hospital de Afuera_ explains the outrageous anatomical contortions in the blunt good-natured fashion of the people: "Picture by El Greco when he went mad." But as El Greco never went mad, we rest dissatisfied with the information. There can be no doubt that every strongly-marked nature reveals excess of some sort in whatever direction development may tend. Neither men nor things, nor colour nor line, can appear the same to all. The same sex and nation produced Rossetti's women and Romney's. Greuze and Puvis de Chavannes see Frenchwomen with a different eye, though woman herself is the eternally unchanged, the same variously-imaged enigma of the beginning, rather reflected and modified through the glance that scans her than seriously altered or influenced by environment and impression. Humanity was not an elegant affair for Hogarth, and viewed through El Greco's imagination, it ceased to possess proportion, and man became absurdly tall and grotesquely contorted. He bestows the finished hand of twenty on a child of ten, and shoots his saints up to such a height as would make them ridiculous in Frederick's famous Potsdam regiment of giants. But this is no indication of madness, any more than any other exaggeration of a