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of Edinburgh, Session 1878 - 79 . 
which brought out his first appearance in print in a small volume, 
entitled “The Songs of the Holy Land.” Like most young men, 
Stirling’s first essays in writing were in verse, and like most wise 
men, his efforts in verse ceased with the first effusion. His good 
genius left him free ever after to express himself in prose. After 
leaving Cambridge he lived much on the Continent ; and having a 
facility for the acquisition of languages, he became a tolerable pro- 
ficient in Trench, Italian, and Spanish. It was the last-named 
language, and the literature which it opened up, that seized on his 
youthful mind and influenced the whole current of his future 
thoughts. Spain was at that time little visited by the British 
traveller, and the literature of the country was to the ordinary 
student sealed up in an unknown tongue. Prescott and Lord, and 
others with them, have since given us an insight into the treasures, 
artistic and literary, which are stored up in the Peninsula. To 
Stirling they came with all the freshness of original discovery. 
The early history of the Moor and the Cid, tinctured with 
romance, and having its roots in the struggles of the mind after 
religion, was peculiarly attractive to a young man whose natural 
bent was to the sombre in art and the ascetic in religion. He 
returned again and again to Spain, and familiarised himself with 
her literature and her art — so unlike the literature and art of 
northern Europe. To the latter branch of study he at first devoted 
his attention. Spanish art, unlike Italian, is characterised by its 
positive features of religion and decorum, and is no less marked by 
its negative features of deficiency in landscape, in marine, and in 
animal painting. The Church, the supreme power in Spain, dis- 
couraged the study of anatomy ; and the result is, that the subjects 
in which the Italians most delighted were shunned or neglected by 
the Spaniards. The consequence was, that to those whose educa- 
tion was based on the Italian school, the Spanish treatment of 
sacred subjects seemed dry and unintelligible. Thus, whilst Raphael 
and Michael Angelo were familiar to the minds of our countrymen 
(as they deserved to be), the not much inferior, but very different, 
greatness of Morales, of Zurbaran, and of Velazquez was but coldly 
recognised. Eew had seen them in the Madrid gallery, and the few 
who had seen even Velazquez, the greatest of them, had not yet 
begun to recognise him as the artist who “drew the minds of men.” 
