Page:Anecdotes of painters, engravers, sculptors and architects, and curiosities of art (IA anecdotesofpaint01spoo).pdf/254

 it?" Cano replied, "Some five-and-twenty days." "Well," said the Auditor, "that comes to four doubloons per day." "Your lordship reckons wrong," said Cano, "for I have spent fifty years in learning to execute it in twenty-five days." "That is all very well, but I have spent my patrimony and my youth in studying at the University, and in a higher profession; now here I am, Auditor in Granada, and if I get a doubloon a day, it is as much as I do." Cano had scarce patience to hear him out. "A higher profession, indeed!" he exclaimed; "the king can make judges out of the dust of the earth, but it is reserved for God alone to make an Alonso Cano." Saying this, he took up the figure and dashed it to pieces on the pavement; whereupon the Auditor escaped as fast as he could, not feeling sure that Cano's fury would confine itself to the statue.

CANO'S HATRED OF THE JEWS.

Another characteristic of Cano, was his insuperable repugnance for any persons tainted with Judaism. It appears that in Granada the unhappy persons of that nation who were penitenciados (i.e. who had been subjected to penance by the Inquisition) were in the habit of getting what they could to support themselves, by selling linen and other articles about the streets; they wore of course the sambenito, or habit prescribed by the Inquisition as the mark of their penance. If Cano met one of these