feast-day; her emotions are purely human, and
in her face is nothing more than the intense love of a mother for her
child. But the Italian shows a creature not of earth, an angelic maid
with almond eyes, oval of face: she has a strange air of unrealness, for
her body is not of human flesh and blood, and she is linked with mankind
only by an infinite sadness; she seems to see already the Dolorous Way,
and her eyes are heavy with countless unwept tears.

One picture especially, that which the painter himself thought his best
work, _Saint Thomas of Villanueva distributing Alms_, to my mind offers
the entire impression of that full life of Andalusia. In the splendour
of mitre and of pastoral staff, in the sober magnificence of
architecture, is all the opulence of the Catholic Church; in the worn,
patient, ascetic face of the saint is the mystic, fervid piety which
distinguished so wonderfully the warlike and barbarous Spain of the
sixteenth century; and lastly, in the beggars covered with sores, pale,
starving, with their malodorous rags, you feel strangely the swarming
poverty of the vast population, downtrodden and vivacious, which you
read of in the picaresque novels of a later day. And these same
characteristics, the deep religious feeling, the splendour, the poverty,
the extreme sense of vigorous life, the discerning may find even now
among the Andalusians for all the modern modes with which, as with coats
of London and bonnets of Paris, they have sought to liken themselves to
the rest of Europe.

And the colours of Murillo's palette are the typical colours of
Andalusia, rich, hot, and deep--again contrasting with the enamelled
brilliance of the Umbrians. He seems to have charged his brush with the
very light and atmosphere of Seville; the country bathed in the
splendour of an August sun has just the luminous character, the haziness
of contour, which characterise the paintings of Murillo's latest manner.
They say he adopted the style termed _vaporoso_ for greater rapidity of
execution, but he cannot have lived all his life in that radiant
atmosphere without being impregnated with it. In Andalusia there is a
quality of the air which gives all things a limpid, brilliant softness,
the sea of gold poured out upon them voluptuously rounds away their
outlines; and one can well imagine that the master deemed it the
culmination of his art when he painted with the same aureate effulgence,
when he put on canvas those gorgeous t