natural tendency. Even in the _Expolio_, his first known great picture, painted when he was a young man, his predilection for excessive height is visible in the tall figure of Christ, and as the years go on this predilection accentuates itself, till his figures cease to be natural. The same tendency to distort the human limbs reveals itself in his magnificent picture in the little church of Santo Tomé, in the upper portion of which one notes extraordinary figures of angels out of drawing, with twisted limbs over clouds. Philip, in his dissatisfaction with his bargain was, however, as befits a prince, more honourable than the chapter of Toledo. He paid El Greco the price of his work, and only with difficulty did the unhappy artist obtain, for his reputation's sake, a grudging admission of the picture into the _Sala de Capitular_, while Philip ordered for the chapel, in its stead, another picture of Romulo Cincinnato. But these rebuffs were few in a truly brilliant career. The wonder is how he found time, as well as physical strength, for all the commissions he received. He built the extremely elegant façade of the Ayuntamiento, which makes an odd and formal note in its Gothic and semi-Moorish environment, in Greco-Roman style, but has a fine and dignified effect against an appropriate depth of azure to carry out the classical intention of a son of Greece. The side towers give lightness to the solidity of the immense base, and if the columns and arches do not succeed in producing a general impression of grace--a quality absent in nearly all El Greco's work--there is no sin anywhere against harmony. The interior is worth a visit if it were only for the pleasure of reading on stone Manrique's sententious and noble lines, with their indubitable ring of the plumed, dramatic ages and the hidalgo's studious search for the fitting word, the fitting gesture, that shall send him down to posterity in the worthiest form: "Nobles, discretos varones, Que gobernais à Toledo, En aquestas escalones Desechad las aficiones, Codicio, temor, y miedo. Por los comunes provechos Dejad los particulares; Pues vos fizo Dios pilares De tan riquisimos techos, Estad firmes y derechos." When the Toledans wore their famed steel, and damascene armour was the fashion and not a curiosity, the "discreet and noble males" Manrique so magnificently addresses, may have lived up to the high civic ideal of these verses, but it is much to be doubted if the modern Toledans, who no longer seek distraction in the excitement of excellent steel, and fashion paper-knives for books they never read, of damascene instead of exquisite armour, maintain this level of austere civic virtue.