Page:Impressions of Spain in 1866.djvu/39

Rh is detestable : bitterly cold in winter, the east wind searching out every rheumatic joint in one's frame, and pitilessly driving round the corners of every street ; burning hot in summer, with a glare and dust which nearly equal that of Cairo in a simoom.

The Gallery, however, compensates for all. Our travellers had spent months at Florence, at Rome, at Dresden, and fancied that nothing could come up to the Pitti, the Uffizi, or the Vatican — that no picture could equal the * San Sisto ; * but they found they had yet much to learn. No one who has not been in Spain can so much as imagine what Murillo is. In England, he is looked upon as the clever painter of picturesque brown beggar- boys : there is not one of these subjects to be found in Spain, from St. Sebastian to Gibraltar ! At Madrid, at Cadiz, but especially at Seville, one learns to know him as he is — i. e. the great mystical religious painter of the seventeenth cen- tiuy, embodying in his wonderftd conceptions all that is most sublime and ecstatic in devotion, and in the representation of Divine love. The English minister, speaking of this one day to a lady of the party, explained it very simply, by saying that the English generally only carried off those of his works in which the Catholic feeling was not