sense
of beauty. Velazquez was not perhaps very happy with this work,
because Nature had endowed Philip's wife with a face that was almost as
dull and unresponsive to emotion as that of her lord and master; but
after a time children were born, and the court painter had a more
sympathetic task. He has left portraits that are quite charming of the
Infanta Margarita and the Infante Philip Prosper; he painted both of
the children while they were very young. In point of fact, neither
lived to grow up; doubtless they would have been uninteresting enough
if 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 Meninas." 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 Meninas"), "The Spinners" ("Las Hilanderas"),
"AEsop," "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 fe_--to
keep dwarfs as playthings. Perhaps because the