they had been spared. The Infanta Margarita is to be seen in Vienna, in Paris, and in Madrid, and she of course is the centre of the famous picture, "Las Meniñas." Prince Prosper was painted by Velazquez, when no more than two years old. There were two other children, Prince Ferdinand and Prince Carlos II., but the former was no more than a year old when Velazquez died, and Carlos was unborn. Of the four children born to Philip IV. by his second wife, three died young.

In the last years of his life, when the pressure of court duties and the ill-will of highly placed fools must have been hard to bear, Velazquez found time to paint some of his greatest masterpieces. "The Maids of Honour" ("Las Meniñas"), "The Spinners" ("Las Hilanderas"), "Æsop," "Menippus," "The Coronation of the Virgin," and the "Venus with the Mirror," are all the ripe fruit of the painter's last decade. His art had matured; adversity had thrown him back upon his work; it was the solace of the hours that were not claimed by absurd official duties. Who shall say that the scant consideration he received from parasites and courtiers was an unmixed evil? The men who despised the painter because Philip favoured him may have helped to mould his character, may have enabled him to detach himself completely from his own official character when he could lay aside the garb of office and turn to his beloved canvases once again. The portraits of Philip in his last years, those of his second wife and her children, those of the dwarfs too, belong to the years between 1651 and 1660.

It was a custom of the unhealthy and depressing Spanish court in which the queen lived in an armour of corsets and crinoline, and might not be touched by any of her faithful subjects upon pain of death—the court in which the king was compelled to preside at the autos da fé—to keep dwarfs as playthings. Perhaps because they were ugly and deformed they came quite naturally into the court environment. The earliest portrait of Don Balthasar Carlos shows him in company with a dwarf, and there were about the court many other unfortunate creatures whom Velazquez painted between 1650 and 1659.

There is more than a suspicion in the minds of many of his biographers that the half-concealed contempt with which Velazquez was regarded in court circles left him small choice of company; that he was rated with dwarfs and outcasts because he worked with his hands; and of course no hidalgo, who was a perfect master of the art of time-wasting, could take seriously any low-blooded creature who earned his right to live by working. If Velazquez had been on the same footing as Rubens—had he enjoyed the same position that Goya, with no greater official appointment, was to hold a little more than a century after his death—we may presume that the dwarfs would not have been painted, and that Velazquez' art would have been given to the service of the blue-blooded gentlemen who were making as big a muddle of Spanish interests as their country's worst enemies could desire. One hesitates to say that they would have been less interesting sitters, because we know that nobody, however dull and stupid in appearance, could fail to become interesting at the hands of the painter. It is fair to remember, too, in defence of the Spanish attitude, that the years were given not to the arts of peace but to those of war; that leisure was scanty, intrigue unceasing, and the austerity of life was made greater by the strong and merciless grip of the Church. Formality and superstition marched hand in hand in a court whose ruler, if we may judge by his portraits, had forgotten how to smile. Then again, the atmosphere of the Madrid court, for all its dulness and secrecy and unhealthy ways, was not as it became under Charles III., when Godoy played the part of Count Olivarez, and the Countess Benavente, the Duchess of Alba, and other women as frail as they were beautiful, did not hesitate to indulge in open intrigue with the king's painter. Turn to the canvases of Velazquez and you will not find a woman who was fascinating enough to have been worth the trouble and danger of an intrigue. The wives of Philip IV. could not but have been virtuous, and would have had but small sympathy with pretty women. To be sure Philip IV. had many mistresses, but he did not ask his court painter to record their beauty.

Before Velazquez returned to Madrid from his second visit to Italy, he seems to have painted the portrait of the dwarf known as "El Primo," now in the Prado. This man, known in private life as Don Louis de Hacedo, accompanied Philip on a tour, and he seems to have been a studious person, because the artist has depicted him with book, pen, and paper, and given him a refined expression. The others have little to redeem their ugliness and deformity. The child of Vallecas seems to be the dwarf who figures with Don Balthasar Carlos in the first picture that Velazquez painted of the unfortunate young prince, the one that is now in America. He has grown a little older and a little more ugly in the canvas that is devoted entirely to his portrait; he does not wear good clothes, but a coarse green coat with stockings to match. The Idiot of Coria is also dressed in green, though his garments are a little richer, but Don Antonio seems to have been a person of some importance. He is pictured in the Prado standing beside a beautiful mastiff almost as big as himself, and he wears a ruddy brown dress worked with gold. He carries a large plumed hat in his hand. Sebastian de Morra, who sits facing the audience, has one of the most wonderful heads ever set on canvas by the artist. This dwarf too is dressed in the green costume that would seem to have been worn by the dwarfs attached to the court of Spain. In addition to the little company of dwarfs there were buffoons at the court, and of these Velazquez painted Pablillos, who is known as "the comedian," and Don Juan of Austria, whose portrait is a triumph of harmony in colour, the pink of mantle and stockings contrasting admirably with black doublet and cape.

PLATE VI.—ADMIRAL ADRIANO PULIDO PAREJA

This picture may be seen in the National Gallery. It is signed and dated 1639, and was purchased from the Longford Castle Collection in 1890. Señor Beruete holds a strong opinion that it was not painted by Velazquez.

In the last years the painter seems to have gone a little further down in the social scale in search of his sitters, for the "Æsop" is a beggar, and "Menippus" is no better. To all these sufferers and outcasts Velazquez responded with a sympathy that is not less clearly revealed than the technique that gives so much enduring delight to artists the world over.

In the final decade of the painter's life Philip seems to have given him no more than two sittings. Perhaps the artist's "Mars" and his "Venus with the Mirror" gave offence in Madrid, where the nude was only accepted if it was painted by some artist who had won his fame outside the Iberian Peninsula. The whole trend of life in the court of Mariana of Austria was opposed to the presentation of the nude in art. The two late pictures of Philip, of which the one is in the Prado and the second in our National Gallery, are quite the most finished of all his studies of his royal master. The face, free from even a suggestion of human interest or enthusiasm, has no emotion whatsoever save disillusionment and sadness. The spectator gets a suggestion that life has resolved itself into a long series of formal duties and formal enjoyments, and that neither suffices to make it worth living. Duty to the world at large and to the vast empire slipping from his grasp seems to be all that holds Philip; and when we consider that he had lost his first wife and her promising son, and of his children by his second