gant refinement, for it was under the seducing form of good taste, that this iconoclastic impiety of the eighteenth century found its way into the house. Ah, what wounds that error dealt upon the bosom of Spanish America! The South American Colonies had been founded at an epoch when the Spanish fine arts showed proudly to Europe the pencils of Murillo, Velasquez, and Sambrano, as well as the swords of the Duke of Alva, the great captain, and of Cortez. The possession of Flanders added to its products those of Flemish engraving, which, painted in rough lineaments and crude colors the religious scenes which were the foundation of the national poetry. Murillo, in his early years, made innumerable virgins and saints for South America; the second-rate painters sent it whole lives of saints for the convents, the passion of Jesus Christ in immense galleries of pictures, and Flemish engraving, as now French lithography, put within reach of moderate fortunes the history of the Prodigal Son, and virgins and saints of as many types as the calendar furnishes. The walls of our ancestors' and fathers' apartments were tapestried with these images, and not rarely the practiced eye of an artist could discover some line of a master-hand in the midst of all this rubbish. But the revolution pointed its finger against the religious emblems. Ignorant and blind in its antipathies, it averted its eyes from painting which was Spanish, colonial, ancient, and irreconcilable with the new ideas. Devout families hid their pictures of the saints, not to show the bad taste of preserving them; and in San Juan, and other places, there were those who used the canvas for trowsers for their slaves. What treasures of art must have been lost by these stupid profanations in which all South America was an accomplice, for there was a period at which everywhere at once prevailed the fatal demolition of that luxuriant
