the most charming air of telling it nothing. "The Burial of the Count of Orgaz" proves El Greco something more than a complete artist; it proves his intellectual force, for here he brings all the distinguished qualities of the brain to the very different qualities of the painter's eye and hand. Of these latter it would be difficult to say too much. Look at the wonderful shadow of death in the livid grey of the corpse, and then at the brilliance of St Augustine's episcopal robes! Examine above all the lovely head of the boy, St Stephen, not in the least Spanish, a dream of sweet and stainless youth, with warm-hued beauty to thrill the glance, and just enough of heaven about the young brown head to suggest the absent aureole. And from these fresh-tinted cheeks, so purely rounded, look at the two emaciated and pallid monks behind, and then down at little Acolyte, who has much more of the air of a proud and charming little princess, with a practised grace of gesture and an inherited dignity of glance than a church lad. Is it possible to paint more supremely four such different hours and moods of life--dawn, radiant morning, dull twilight, and cold night,--to unite in a higher degree the skill and power of a master? No wonder the enthusiastic sonneteer addressed him as "Miraculous Greek" and "Divine Greek." This picture has indeed genius's rare and inimitable touch of divinity. All else, with patience and talent, may be acquired but this, and had El Greco never painted anything else, by the "Burial" of Santo Tomé alone he would stand apart in the history of Spanish art, with the world's select few. It is a singular fact, as I have pointed out, that such a painter's influence on the town he lived in should not be more marked in every way than references to the period would lead us to assume. He had pupils certainly, but we only hear of two, Luis Tristan, his favourite, and Fray Bautista Maino. Tristan has left a good deal of work in Toledo which is often taken to be El Greco's in decline. Apart from the master's, it is notable in its way, still and rather colourless; but a story told of master and pupil bears retelling as an excellent trait in El Greco. The one characteristic we are permitted to gather from the obscurity that envelopes the man, is a haughty conviction of the value of his art. There was no lack of confidence here, no feeble self-depreciation, no meek concern for the judgment of others. In all altercations between him and the purchasers, the purchasers were naturally the blockheads, and in no circumstance whatever could he possibly err, not even when he was convicted of wilfully contorting and dislocating the human body. He only went on seeing more and more crooked by a natural perversity. Now, not content to worship art and its rights in his own emphatic work, he taught his disciples to do likewise in theirs. This is his uncompromising method of teaching such a lesson.