Sir Frederick Leighton on Tuesday delivered, at the Royal Academy,
a lecture on " Spain and Spanish Art," which we do not hesitate to characterise as his finest oratorical performance. Though ornate, as Sir Frederick cannot help being, it is almost free of " purple patches," is studded with brilliant paragraphs, such as the description of the Moorish influence in Spain, and ends in intelligible and definite conclusions. Sir Frederick Leighton, with the most cordial appreciation of all Spanish art, and an admiration even for Zurbaran's gloom, which he will find few to share, holds that Spanish art as a whole is "the expression of a great and masculine race, fervid in temper perhaps beyond any other, but with little creative artistic impulse, little sensitiveness of artistic -fibre ; a race possessed with noble instincts and lofty ideals, but ideals solely ethic,—aesthetic ideals are entirely wanting amongst Spaniards." It is due, probably, though Sir Frederick did not say so, to this absence of the aesthetic that the purchasing classes, who rarely in any country love the ethical, for generations so greatly preferred Italian and Flemish art that Spanish art was almost blotted out, and that to this day a majority of old pictures in Spain are either im- portations, or the work of foreigners who had grown only partially " Hispaniolised."
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