Our Acquaintance Quickly Ripened Into The Affectionate Friendship Which Became A Tender Regret When We Looked Our Last Upon It; And Vast As It Was, It Was Never Too Large For Our Embrace.

I doubt if there was a moment in our fortnight's devotion when we thought the doughty canons, its brave-

Spoken founders, "mad to have undertaken it," as they said they expected people to think, or any moment when we did not revere them for imagining a temple at once so beautiful and so big.

Our first visit was redeemed from the commonplace of our duty-round of the side-chapels by two things which I can remember without the help of my notes. One, and the great one, was Murillo's "Vision of St. Anthony," in which the painter has most surpassed himself, and which not to have seen, Gautier says, is not to have known the painter. It is so glorious a masterpiece, with the Child joyously running down from the clustering angels toward the kneeling saint in the nearest corner of the foreground, that it was distinctly a moment before I realized that the saint had once been cut out of his corner and sent into an incredible exile in America, and then munificently restored to it, though the seam in the canvas only too literally attested the incident. I could not well say how this fact then enhanced the interest of the painting, and then how it ceased from the consciousness, which it must always recur to with any remembrance of it.

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