The first plate represents a money match, a poor young girl sacrificed by her avaricious parents, to a cacochymical and horrible old man. The bride looks charming with her little black velvet mask, and her basquina ornamented with deep fringe, for Goya represents Andalusian and Castilian beauty most marvellously; her parents are hideous with rapacity and envious misery, resembling in the most astounding manner sharks and crocodiles. The poor child is laughing through her tears, like the sun piercing an April shower. All around is a mere mass of eyes, claws, and teeth: the intoxicating effects of dress prevent the girl from yet feeling the whole extent of her misfortune. This is a subject which often returns to the point of Goya's pencil, and he always succeeds in producing very striking effects. Further on, we have _el Coco_, "Bogy," who frightens little children, and who would frighten many others of more mature age, for, with the exception of the ghost of Samuel in Salvator Rosa's picture of the "Witch of Endor," I do not know of anything more horrible than this goblin. Then, again, we see a number of _majos_ whispering soft things to dapper young damsels on the Prado--handsome creatures with tightly-fitting silk stockings, little pointed slippers, which are only kept on the foot by the tip of the great toe, high-backed tortoiseshell combs, with open carving, and more lofty than the mural crown of Cybele; black lace mantillas, worn like a hood, and casting a velvety shadow on the finest black eyes in the world; short-skirted petticoats loaded with lead, the better to show off the rich form of the hips; beauty spots placed most murderously at the corner of the mouth, and near the temples; heart-breakers sufficient to break all the hearts in Spain, and large fans spread out like the tail of a peacock. There are also hidalgos in pumps and prodigious coats, with flat cocked-hats under their arms, and large bunches of seals and keys hanging on their stomach making their bows _à trois temps_, leaning over the backs of the chairs, in order to puff, like the smoke of their cigars, clouds of light-hearted madrigals into some thick mass of beautiful black hair, or leading about some divinity of more or less doubtful character, by the tips of their white kid gloves. In another page, again, you see a number of complaisant mothers, giving their too obedient daughters advice worthy of the Macette of Régnier, washing and greasing them to go to the witches' sabbath. The type of the "Complaisant Mother" is marvellously rendered by Goya, who, like all the Spanish painters, possesses a ready and profound sense of the ignoble. It is impossible to fancy anything more grotesquely horrible, more viciously deformed. Each of these frightful old shrews unites in her own person the ugliness of the seven capital sins; compared to them, the Prince of Darkness himself is pretty. Just fancy whole ditches and counterscarps of wrinkles; eyes like live coals that have been