some papers on Light and Heat, written by a young man of only nineteen years of age, living in one of the remotest parts of Cornwall. To him Beddoes at once offered the scientific superintendence of the new Institution, which included a laboratory for experiment, a hospital, and a lecturing theatre. Humphry Davy - for he it was eagerly accepted an appointment so congenial to his tastes.

66

The young chemist forthwith began a series of experiments on the physiological effects of different gases, in the course of which he more than once all but killed himself, by resolutely inhaling some of the most deadly aerial fluids. One of the very first of the gases to which he turned his attention was Priestley's 'dephlogisticated nitrous air." Shortly before, an American chemist, named Mitchell, had propounded a theory of contagion by which this gas was credited with a capacity of mischief-working perfectly appalling. It was stated to be the active principle in all contagion, and to be capable of producing the most terrible effects when respired in the minutest quantities, or even when applied to the skin. To investigate the qualities of so pestilent an "air" required some little courage. Davy first satisfied himself by cautious attempts, frequently repeated, that the gas could be breathed, at least in small quantities, without any of the dire effects ascribed to it. It should here be mentioned that in Davy's experiments the gas was inhaled in a diluted form, as his arrangements did not provide for a complete exclusion of the air in the course of the experiment. Convinced that it was so far innocuous, he at last determined on inhaling continuously a tolerably large quantity of the gas. He found that the first inspirations caused slight giddiness; this was succeeded by an uncommon sense of fulness in the head; then shortly after came a sensation analogous to gentle pressure on all the muscles, attended by a highly pleasurable thrilling, particularly in the chest and extremities. "The objects around me," he says, "became dazzling, and my hearing more acute, and at last an irresistible propensity to action was indulged in. I recollect but indistinctly what followed; I know that my motions were various and violent." These effects soon ceased on discontinuing the respiration.

This experiment showed Davy that he had got to do with a gas of very extraordinary physiological properties, and it stimulated him to further investigation. He soon found that the feeling of exhilaration was diminished when too large a quantity was respired; and further, that the mental effects were by no means uniform, but depended to a considerable degree on the bodily and mental condition at the time of the experiment. Sometimes the feelings produced were those of intense intoxication, attended by but little pleasure; while at other times the respiration of the gas gave rise to sublime emotions, connected with highly vivid ideas. He noticed that the delight was always most intense when he inhaled the gas after excitement, whether from moral or physical causes. The most remarkable experiment which he made was one intended to test the effects of the long-continued inhalation of the gas in a form more diluted than ordinary. For this purpose he shut himself up in an air-tight chamber filled with the diluted gas. We have not space to quote the narrative of his impressions; but after remaining in the chamber an hour and a quarter, the desire for action became so painful that he came out, and immediately thereafter began anew to respire the gas from a silken bag. His feelings were now raised to a state which he evidently finds it difficult to portray in words: "A thrilling extending from the chest to the extremities was almost immediately produced. I felt a sense of tangible extension highly pleasurable in every limb; my visible impressions were dazzling, and apparently magnified. By degrees, as the pleasurable sensations increased, I lost all connection with external things; trains of vivid visible images rapidly passed through my mind, and were connected with words in such a manner as to produce perceptions perfectly novel. I existed in a world of newly connected and newly modified ideas. I theorized; I imagined I made discoveries." When awakened from this semi-delirious trance by the

bag being withdrawn from his mouth, he says: "Indigna tion and pride were the first feelings produced by the per sons about me. My emotions were enthusiastic and sublime. As I recovered my former state of mind, I felt an inclination to communicate the discoveries I had made during the experiment. I endeavored to recall the ideas; they were feeble and in distinct. One collection of terms, however, presented itself; and with the most intense be lief and prophetic manner, I exclaimed: "Nothing exists but thoughts! The universe is composed of impressions, ideas, pleasures, and pains!"" Here, then, to all appear ance, was the discovery of a panacea for human ills, such as had never entered into the imagination of poet to com ceive. De Quincey says, that when he first experienced the pleasures of opium eating, he felt that he had made the discovery that happiness was a thing which could be bot tled in a small phial and carried in the waistcoat pocket But here was not happiness merely, but ecstasy

not, in

deed, in quite so compact and portable a form, but easily generated in any quantity by the simple process of decomposing nitrate of ammonia by heat! In establishing his Institution, Dr. Beddoes had in view only to cure and alle viate, by means of his "airs," the diseases of the body. Might he not now, with this

Sweet oblivious antidote,

Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff Which weighs upon the heart?

Davy's discovery, of course, soon got wind, and the British Medical Pneumatic Institution found itself famous It was now visited by many literary and scientific men, curious to experience the effects of the wonder-working gas Southey, Coleridge, Lovell Edgeworth, and Dr. Roget were among the number of those experimented on. Its effects were found to vary very much in different constitutions. Some were obviously much more 'susceptible to its influence than others, but all in more or less degree bore testimony to its exhilarating qualities, and its power to produce new and delightful sensations.

But the question still remained to be tested, whether an agent whose effects on the constitution were so singularly manifested, possessed any useful qualities to sanction its administration in cases of disease. Did this entrancing "air" resemble in its influence the serviceable Scotch brownie, or only one of those fantastic sprites whose pranks are of little or no earthly use to any one? Experience soon appeared to show that "laughing-gas," by which name it was now popularly known (though it may be re marked its action on some persons is to cause hysterical weeping), was of little use except as a kind of physiologi cal curiosity. Dr. Beddoes tried its therapeutic virtues in various ailments, but with little effect, except, indeed, that in one case a few whiffs of it nearly liberated a patient from all her mortal ills. One or two psychologists, also, curious to establish its precise effects on the mental faculties, and possibly hopeful, through the exaltation of the intellectual powers produced by it, to solve some great psychological problem, subjected themselves to its influence, but, as the result of Davy's last-mentioned experiment might have indicated, with no effect. Oliver Wendell Holmes tells us, half-laughingly, half-gravely, that on one occasion he inhaled a pretty full dose of ether a substance whose phys iological effects closely resemble in many points those of nitrous oxide-with the determination to put on record, at the earliest moment of regaining consciousness, the thought he should find uppermost in his mind. He relates that, when under the influence of the ether," the veil of eternity was lifted, the one great truth which underlies all human experience, and is the key to all the mysteries that philosophy has sought in vain to solve, flashed upon me in a sudden revelation. Henceforth, all was clear; a few words had uplifted my intelligence to the level of the knowledge of the cherubim. As my natural condition returned, I remembered my resolution, and staggering to my desk, I wrote, in ill-shaped straggling characters, the allembracing truth still glimmering in my consciousness.

The words were these (children will smile, the wise will onder): A strong smell of turpentine prevails throughout." After the time of Davy, laughing-gas was almost thrown side by men of science, as it did not appear capable of ubserving any useful function. It now fell into somewhat lisreputable company. Electro-biologists, peripatetic lectring mesmerists, and others of the like stamp, pretended ublicly to exhibit its physiological properties. But it ventually showed itself possessed of qualities which fitted t for better society. Davy himself, with the prescience of enius, suggested an application of it which may be said to e the first practical hint towards the use of our modern næsthetics. "As nitrous oxide," he says, 66 seems capale of destroying physical pain, it may probably be used vith advantage during surgical operations." It was more han sixty years after this suggestion had been made, beore the gas began to be used as an anesthetic. It was in America that nitrous oxide (as well as chloroform) was irst employed to produce insensibility; and from that country it was introduced into England as a tried and useul anaesthetic, in 1868. When used for this purpose, the gas is inhaled, not in the diluted form in which Davy used t, but entirely free from all admixture of atmospheric air. t is now the anaesthetic commonly used by dentists. For he purpose of the operating surgeon, it is not well adapted, is the period of insensibility from one administration lasts only about a minute, or a minute and a half at furthest. But, for the purpose of the dentist, this period is usually sufficient; and one of the commonest of dental operations may now be submitted to with perfect freedom from pain. The rapidity with which insensibility is produced, the absence of any unpleasant odor or troublesome after-effects, and its comparative safety, all eminently fit it for the pose to which it is now commonly applied. The chief disadvantage in its employment, up to this time, has been the costliness of the apparatus for making and administering it; but this is now in some measure obviated, as the gas may be procured in small compass in a liquid form, and liberated for use as required.

pur

The most recent experimental application of nitrous oxide in this country involves a return to the idea of the old Bristol physician. Dr. Beddoes, we have seen, applied it to diseased bodies; but, obvious as the idea appears, it does not seem to have occurred to him that its peculiar action rather indicated its applicability to mental maladies. An agent capable of stimulating the mental powers, and producing exalted emotions, would, of all others, appear suited to that class of the mentally alienated who remain continually plunged in the depths of melancholy. The gas in its dilute form has lately been tried in this class of mental diseases; but the published accounts do not permit us to say that the results are very encouraging. For the time, it is true, it wonderfully stimulates the dormant mental powers, and enables the sufferer to recall with vividness the events of the past. Even in cases in which the power of coherent speech appeared to have been lost forever, the inhalation of the gas has enabled the patients to relate, in a collected manner, long passages of their past lives. For the moment, it often gives a new direction to the thoughts, changing in a marked manner the current of the ideas. But the effects are only transient; and it is possible that were we acquainted with the mode of action of the gas, this tentative application of it might turn out to be a mistake. But in regard to this question of its physiological action what changes it undergoes and effects within the body — there is hardly anything yet known.

MASTERS OF ETCHING.

BY FREDERICK WEDMORE.

III.

WELL, we have come now to the chiefest among our Masters of Etching the last Dutchman with whom we have to deal - he in whose work is resumed the excellence and power of the whole Netherlands school: he whose art, like

that of our own more limited Hogarth, is an art of " strance," and not of" rapture."

remon

Rembrandt has had biographers enough; but their disagreements have involved his life in mystery. Latest research appears, however, to show that he was born in 1606, on the 15th of July, and that he died at Amsterdam with proper bourgeois comfort, and not at Stockholm, miserably, in the first days of October, 1669. The son of a miller, whose mill was in the city of Leyden, he went of college in that city as boy and youth; and in days before it was the fashion, in the backward North, to be a painter of culture, he neglected his studies to grapple early with art. Owing little even of technical excellence to any master at allowing most to perseverance and set purpose, and ready hand and observant eye he settled in Amsterdam in 1630, when twenty-four years old; sure already of profitable service in fixing upon canvas no fleeting beauty of maiden or child, but those stern burgher faces, laden with thought and with past toil, which even then charmed and impressed him more strongly than any other thing he saw in the bounded city streets or under the far-reaching skies - skies, you remember, that stretched like a gray canopy over those flats of field, canal, and foot-bridge which formed the landscape of his youth, and, touched by a magic hand, passed long afterwards into the landscape of his art.

His success was early perhaps not very brilliant at the beginning, but from the first substantial. He has taken to etching two years before his settlement in Amsterdam, and has pursued that art diligently during the first years of his residence. His mother's face-wise, worthy, and even handsome; his own face, rough and keen, and beautiful, like his work, by its expression; incidents, light or low, of the city streets or long stretching highways these are his subjects in the earlier years. Then he turns to religious work, and then to portrait-painting. It is probable that he painted many an obscure portrait before we have record of his labors in this kind; but however that may be, he gradually takes his place in good burgher society — rich, pious, or intellectual executing, in 1635, his portrait of Uytenbogaert, the minister of the sect known as the Remonstrants; in 1636, the portrait of Janus Sylvius. This second divine was probably made known to him through his young wife-for Rembrandt, prospering early, had somewhat early married: had married, too, a woman of fair fortune and good position in the town. Saskia Uylenburg was her name. She died eight years after her marriage; leaving one child, a boy, Titus, who in due time became a painter, never much known or greatly esteemed, and who died in 1668, a year or two before his father.

Rembrandt, a widower, is busy with his work and with society; living in a house in the Breestraat, in the Jewish quarter, near St. Anthony's Bridge, and collecting in that house a whole museum of works of art: medieval armor, and antique bronzes, prints by Lukas van Leyden, and prints as precious by Mantegna, and oil paintings by contemporary hands. Medieval and Renaissance work are alike interesting to him; but it is from the medieval spirit rather than from that of the Renaissance that he learns. In his "Christ driving the Money-changers out of the Temple," he takes the whole figure of Christ from a woodcut of Albert Dürer's. Italian art of the sixteenth century he admires, but he borrows nothing from it. "Ce fut précisément le plus grand trait de son génie, d'avoir admiré tout sans rien imiter; d'avoir connu les beautés d'un autre art, et d'être resté toujours dans le sien."

In the Breestraat he opened his studio. There Gerard Dow, Ferdinand Bol, Van Vliet, Philippe de Koning, and Gerbrandt van den Eckhout were his pupils. He did not make mere imitators. An individual capacity, brought within the influence of his power and fame, was strengthened and developed, but remained individual still. It was for the preservation of individuality that he decreed that each pupil should work unobserved of the rest; each in his place apart.

I have said that Rembrandt was occupied with society, but not indeed with society as the word is very often un

derstood. He sought the company of grave and thoughtful men to feed his intellect sought also, I suppose, some company less elevated, in hours when his object was either frank diversion or the observation of things outside his common circle. His nature was developed on many sides: his friendships and associations were of many kinds. Even the habits of his home, the time and quality of his meals, varied from day to-day. Now he has a banquet with a citizen who is famous; now he eats a herring and some cheese by himself. And so one is told that his nature was mean and stingy and low; that the god of his idolatry was money, and that his best-loved friends were friends of the pot-house in the Breestraat. Yet this is the man who waits all day in an auction-room to buy a print by the great engraver of Leyden — the man whe waits there and will pay any price rather than fail to acquire it. This is the man to whom the great public banker - ReceiverGeneral to the States of Holland —gives, year after year, his friendship and support; the man who year after year is hand-in-glove with Jan Six, a youthful burgomaster, collector, and all-accomplished poet, who must almost realize the ideal of Matthew Arnold. Rembrandt was not "low" in his tastes: his friends were the wisest men in a sober city. He was not sordid in his ways, adding coin to coin. Instead of that, he added picture to picture, till he became insolvent through love of an art, or of a school, not his.

Not indeed that his insolvency was of the usual sort. For household expenses there was money enough, no doubt. But his son Titus, being of age, was to inherit his mother's property, and the painter had expended some of this. To complete the sum, there was a sale in the house, and as the times were hard times for Holland, the sale was not as fruitful as it should have been. The value of all works of art had suffered a depreciation; the proceeds of the sale left Rembrandt in poverty, and his friends were all unable to help him. Their concerns were out of joint, like his own.

And yet, in some sense, this scattering of his precious things was a voluntary act with Rembrandt. Had he remained a widower, Titus could only have inherited at his father's death; but Rembrandt-careless in some moods, as he was careful and sagacious in others - had fallen in love with the fine figure of a peasant girl, of the village of Rarep, in Waterland. He had married the girl in 1654; and two years afterwards, failing otherwise to discharge his obligations towards his son, there came the sale by auction, and the apparent, nay, for a little while, the genuine poverty. But with a healthy man of genius, whose genius is recognized, things have a tendency to right themselves. Soon enough Rembrandt is paid for his work again; his etchings too are sought after as of yore. He takes to academical subjects: we know not why, unless it be that M. Blanc's conjecture is a correct one, and that the model is constantly his wife. And then he ceases altogether to etch confines himself to work with the palette and the brush, and then perhaps illness comes upon him, for work of any kind is rare, and it can hardly be that he is rich and idle. And then there is that break in the story of his life which has enabled some to say that he went to England for a while some, that he went to Stockholm, and died there, miserably. The rest is mystery, and almost silence. There is but one more record, and it is of recent finding, and it attests that on the 8th day of October, 1669, in the church called Westerkirk, in the city of Amsterdam, there was laid down, with all the common pomp of pall and taper, "bell and burial," the body which during three-andsixty years had held the restless soul of Rembrandt.

"The restless soul!" Is that word the key to all his variety of aims and arts? - for he is various, not alone in subjects, but in methods of expression. Now the brush serves him; now the tool of the engraver; and now the needle of the pure etcher is the instrument with which he works. With one or with the other, he essays the representation of all things within his ken: his own face, plain and shrewd, his mother's face, his wife's, the preacher's, burgomaster's, print-seller's; then the gait of the beggar on the door-step, the aspect of the fields and dykes beyond the

Yet sometimes, even in his endeavors, and obviously his achievements, he was quickly limited by the conditions of his life and time. Take, for an instance, his treatmen of the figure. Perhaps that shows better than anythi else how very far he was removed from the great m ters of the Renaissance, and how though it is strang to say it- he had some fellowship with the earlier pr titioners of a ruder art. An Italian, bred to work at a epoch when there were apparent in glowing freshness, te only "the materials of art," which are "at Florence," b "the results," which are "at Rome," devoted himself perfection of line and modelling. He represented the bod only that he might extol it; and while Fra Angelico labor was prayer to the Spirit, his own was praise to th Flesh. But certain plain conditions were required produce this result; and these conditions were wanting t Rembrandt and his period in the Netherlands. revival of learning, and its diffusion, had flooded Italy wit the waters of Greek thought; had stirred in men's mind the sleeping worship of beauty; and had done this too at moment when the enthusiasm of the old religion was was ing and the world seemed ripe for a change, and in a lar where there was beauty abundant, to feed the newer faith But things were different in the Netherlands. How coul physical qualities be one's ideal in the Netherlands, whe the best that were to show were those that Rembrandt has drawn in "Diana at the Bath," and "Danaë and Jupiter Clearly the worship of such beauty as that was an impos sible thing.

But there were other reasons not a whit less strong. I Holland, Protestantism had been a safety-valve of faith Men had saved in sound health the half of their creed by resolutely lopping off the rest of it. What remained to them to Dutchmen of the time of Rembrandt — wa strongly alive and active; and in the midst of a half-hid eous world, that creed summoned them to think of a world that was better, though they lacked imagination to con ceive what the better might be. The influence of common Protestantism upon beauty in art- that may have been wholly bad; but this is not the place in which to speak of it. The influence of Protestantism such as Rembrandt's upon the intellectual and spiritual sides of art, as art was practised at Amsterdam that was probably a more mixed thing, and we do well to glance at it ere passing on. The stunted yet sturdy, realistic, unpoetical faith of the Nether landers induced in art some recognition of possible dignity in present poverty and suffering, and did, though very roughly, still unmistakably proclaim that mind and spirit were masters, and flesh but the servant of these. This Christianity did not recoil from what was physically hideous. Pity, remonstrance: these were her belongings; and they needed but too often to be used. Patiently one must ac cept the ugly facts of life, though passionately indeed one may sorrow and declaim, if passion of remonstrance can remove but one of them. And thus it is that Rembrandt etches seven-and-twenty plates representing in diverse phases and stages the lives and sufferings of beggar and hunchback and cripple and leper, as these crouch wretchedly in the corners of hovels, or uselessly solicit some succor from the rich, or hide in solitude their foulness and degradation. Is it not an unparalleled thingthis array of the miserable? They are not drawn, like the beggars of Murillo, that you may behold the picturesqueness of their rags; nor like the beggars of Callot, that you may laugh at them and notice well the adroitness which will serve their ends. There is no comedy nor farce in them, nor any beauty in their garments' shreds and patches. They are a serious fact in life: theirs is a common condition of humanity. So Rem brandt drew them, like a philosopher who accepted all things; but touched in this case by that pity for their Present, that hope for their Future, which his religion had taught him.

Turn from

And here his religion is distinctly a spiritual gain to his Art. Where then, and why, is it a loss? It is a loss because somehow or other, with all this useful faith in a better future - faith which the true Renaissance held but slackly, and showed but little in its Art- the Art of Rembrandt has no scope for wide imagination: no sweet and secret thing is revealed through it: there flows through it to the minds of men no such divine message as even we of these latter days can read in the art of the earlier Florentines. True and real, very likely it is rarely high and interpretative. The early Art of Italy, fed on a fuller faith, could do more with infinitely smaller means. the soberest of Rembrandt's sacred pictures - the picture most filled with piteous human emotion I mean the "Death of the Virgin," which is real as the death of his mother-turn from this to the still glowing canvas on which Botticelli has imaged his conception of a Paradise with countless companies of little children, children only, round the throne of God, and in circles ever more distant, the great ones of the world—the last, who were first and you feel at once, more strongly than can be told by any words, what Netherlands Protestantism has cost to Rembrandt; for, instead of this parable and this revelation, he can give you but a human sorrow.

Look at him for a moment, such as he is, as a religious artist; and considerable as are the merits forced upon your view, you will find that other allowances will have to be made for him than those which you have made already on account of his epoch's limited though genuine faith. Take his " Adam and Eve" - he calls it "The Temptation" and note the absolute vulgarity in the conception of that scene. What is our first father in this print, if not a lowbred, low-minded, but still prudent bourgeois, tempted, as such a one conceivably might be, by the leers of this squat woman and the good big mouthful of rare fruit which she holds in her outstretched hand? No doubt a part of the failure of this work is to be attributed to the heavy northern ugliness of the women of the land - an ugliness which, shore than anything else, tells against Rembrandt in his treatment of the nude - but part of it is due to a cause within himself; he lacked the imagination to conceive poetically there is nothing of seductiveness in his work; there is nothing of sweetness; there is very little of pleasure.

He lacked, I say, imagination to conceive poetically; but the subject once well found for him, he could contrive embellishments which were effective enough, and neither thought nor work was spared to give it these. His imagination did not play happily about the spirit and idea of the scene: it plied its task only to add to the strangeness or the picturesqueness of the setting. And yet the print which all the world knows as the "Hundred Guilder Piece" shows that in exceptional moods Rembrandt could conceive as worthily as he could execute. True dignity, nay, maj. esty, of attitude is shown in the "Raising of Lazarus; and in the "Death of the Virgin" the artist himself has been profoundly moved - else how portray that piteous gaze and that gesture of sorrow and resignation which lift this work out of the usual level of his sacred Art! But commonly his pictures from the Testaments suffer not only under the necessary conditions of Dutch Protestant creeds, but from the absence of elevation in the types selected, the absence of spiritual imagination, and the temptation to which the artist sometimes yielded to forget his subject and its meaning, and to see in the Scriptural groups little else than a happy opportunity for the distribution of strong lights and stronger shadows.

Many, then, of his professedly religious pictures had no reason to exist. They were in truth less religious than his troop of beggar-pictures- they were less spontaneous results of his own thought. Raison d'être is still more lacking to some of his Academical pieces, unless indeed one is content to allow the presence of these without the justifying beauty. Action, they have; and little else. Anatomically, the drawing is not bad, for Rembrandt understood anatomy; but the figures are constantly ill-proportioned. Yet certain of these pieces, if at the same time less, are also

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more than Academical. Rembrandt did not much believe in Diana, and troubled himself little about Antiope. But present facts of all kinds interested him; and having etched everything under the gray Dutch sky but the bare bodies of men and women in Amsterdam, he set himself, in his later days, to etch these. These baboon or gorilla-like gaunt monsters of men- "The Bathers". - it is not possible that Rembrandt admired them, as he drew. There was more of satire than admiration. And in the whole short Academical series, what strikes you most is the cruel brutal truthfulness. There is no glimpse of any one's ideal: not even the poor and fleshy ideal of Rubens could be satisfied here. These round and palpitating figures they begin well, perhaps, but is there one that is completely good? We single out the "Woman with the Arrow an exception to the common rule of ugliness — though even here we find that among critics there is no general consent of praise - and now contentedly pass on from ground where Rembrandt seems well-nigh lowest among the low, to meet him again where among the great he is almost the greatest.

"

as

There is no doubt that Rembrandt painted many portraits of persons who were never near to fame. You meet with some in public exhibitions and in private houses. Very often, like the etched portrait of Uytenbogaert, the "gold-weigher," they are not only portraits, but elaborated compositions. Of these an example called "The Shipbuilder seen at Burlington House, in January, 1873 will occur to many readers. But the etched portraits were often of distinguished men. Failing these persons of distinction as when, in his youth, sitters of the desired rank were unattainable - he etched the faces that he knew most thoroughly: chiefly, indeed, his mother's. It is also to his delight in reproducing that with which he was most familiar that we must attribute the abundance of portraits of himself: now leaning at his ease upon the window-sill; and now with drawn sabre; and now with hand on hilt of sword magnificent in meditation - and now with plainest raiment, a keen plain face looks up at you from the drawing-board. But the etched portraits, as I have said, when they were not of himself, nor of his mother, nor of the so-called "Jewish Bride," whom M. Blanc believes to be his first wife, Saskia Uylenburg, were generally of men of thought or action of men, indeed, whose thought or action had "told" upon the life of Amsterdam. Burgomaster Six" is a city magnate, as well a poet and art connoisseur. "John Asselyn" is a painter of repute. "Ephraim Bonus" is a famous physician. And Uytenbogaert, the "gold-weigher," is Receiver-General to the

States of Holland.

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"The

Among a thousand excellences in these portraits, let us note a few. See how the "Uytenbogaert" is more than a portrait for it is a composition and see how the keen perception, the analytical yet synthetic mind, the assured knowledge, and the hand that moves in accurate obedience to the will, have in their all but unparalleled combination enabled the artist to say clearly a dozen things instead of one, in this picture. It is a gold-weigher's room: a place for quiet business and weighty affairs. There are places enough for laziness and laughter: this is for serious, anxious, yet methodical and ordered toil. See, on the table, the scales and the ranged money-bags: on the floor an ironbound coffer whose strength, quite apart from size and proportion, the etcher has shown by lines of indefinable cleverness. To the right, the trusty servant kneels to take from his master a bag of coin, which instantly he will pack in this cask upon the floor; and then he will be off upon his errand. We know him, thanks to Rembrandt's never-tiring study of his minor characters, even the Salanios and Salarinos of the drama a prompt man, he, we say, and ever at his master's call. And Uytenbogaert? What is he, if these be his surroundings? There is a double expression in his face and gestures, conveyed with I know not what subtlety of Art, reached sometimes in the finest moments of a great player one has seen it in Fargueil and Kate Terry. The gesture says to the servant — nay, says to all of us-how infinitely precious is that gold

weighted bag: how great must be the care of it! And the face says this too. But such a thought is only momentary. The mind, reflected in the face, is seen to be preoccupied by many an affair. "Here, how much gold remaining to be dealt with! What accounts to finish! What business to discharge!"

Now place by the side of Uytenbogaert the portrait of Janus Lutma. The two have the same dignity: the dinity of labor. It is the Netherlands spirit. With his back to the window, from which a placid light falls on his agewhitened head, sits Janus Lutma, goldsmith, meditating on his work. By him are the implements of his art. They were used a little, but a minute ago, and soon will be resumed. Meanwhile, the nervous, active hand — an old hand, but subtle still-is relaxed, and there is no anxiety, not even the anxiety of a pleasant busy-ness, in the goldsmith's face. It is a happy, tranquil face: still keenly observant, yet greatly at rest. For in the main the work of life is done, and it has prospered; a goodly gift has been well used. There is rest in the thought of past achievements: a kindly smile on the aged mouth-mouth happily garrulous of far-away workdays. And Lutma sits there, waiting, only less plainly and immediately than the tired bellringer of Rethel's one great picture waiting for Death, who will come to him "as a friend," and find him smiling still, but with a finished task and a fulfilled career.

But in our admiration of the sentiment and character of this almost unequalled work, let us not forget the wholly marvellous technical skill which the observer may easily find in it. The play of sunshine, bright and clear, without intensity, throughout the upper half of the picture; the cold, clear stone of the slanting window-sill, washed, as it were, with light; the strain of the leather fabric, stretched from post to post of the chair, on either side of the old man's head, which rests, you see, against it, and presses it back; the modelling of the bushy eyebrows and short gray beard these are but some points out of many. They may serve to lead us to the rest.

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To be closely imitative is not the especial glory of etching; and Rembrandt himself is fuller of suggestion than of imitation. He does suggest texture very marvellously: sometimes in the accessories of his portraits, as in the flowtered cloth of the gold-weigher's table; and sometimes in he portraits themselves, as in the long hair of the "Jewsh Bride:

"Hair, such a wonder of flix and floss;

Freshness and fragrance; floods of it, too!"

The quality of this woman's hair is best observed in the early state of the print. There too the light is natural, the inspiration direct. Thus far the thing has been done at a sitting. In the finished picture the light is a studio light, and the work, while very vigorous and scientific, lacks the particular delightfulness of a sudden transcript from nature and the life.

"A transcript from the life "it is that, more than any qualities of technique and elaboration, that gives an interest so intense to Rembrandt's portraits. It is hardly too much to say of him that his labor is faithful in proportion as it is speedy. He must have observed with the utmost keenness and rapidity, and it is with a like rapidity that he must have executed all that is intellectually greatest in his work. Absorbed in his own labors, singularly free, we may be sure, from petty personal vanities, and the desire to please unworthily-Rembrandt has given to his sitters the same air of absorption. They are not occupied at all with the artist who is drawing them: no, nor with those who will notice his work. The Burgomaster Six, leaning against the window-sill, is deep, I take it, in his own manuscript play. Bonus, the physician, halts upon the stair, not quite resolved whether he shall turn back to ask one other question or give one other counsel. Coppenol is absolutely occupied in giving the boy his writing lesson. Rembrandt himself, looking up from the drawing-board, looks up only for observation. And it is thanks to the absence of detachment from habitual life and work it is thanks to the every-day reality of the faces and their surroundings

that these portraits of Rembrandt, when considered gether, give us the means of transport across two hundre years. We are in Amsterdam, in the 17th century; m. gling with the city's movement; knowing familiarly works and ways. Absolute individuality of character.truth, not only to external appearance, but to the ver mind and soul of the men who are portrayed — and tra be it noted, arrived at very swiftly, and expressed with a unfaltering hand, cramped by no nervous and fidgeting anxiety-this, I suppose, the world may recognize in t etched portraits of Rembrandt.

How true the hands are to the faces and the lives! Ca and not over-care, has been bestowed upon them. The is in every hand Rembrandt has drawn prominently, i master's rapid facility and a master's power. Mark the a hands of Renier Ansloo, that stolid Anabaptist minister

- and the fine, discerning, discriminating hand of Clemers de Jonghe, the print-seller: a man accustomed to the de fingering of delicate papers. Mark too the nervous han of that brooding student, Haaring the younger, whom on knows to have been something finer than a common au tioneer. And for physical feebleness, seen in an old man's hand, note the wavering hand of Haaring the elder. Fe physical strength in an old man's hand—a tenacious hat. for sure yet subtle uses see the sinewy craftsman's han of Lutma.

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It has long been the fashion to admire, indiscriminately the chiar-oscuro of Rembrandt, which does indeed very often deserve a wholly unlimited admiration, but which open now and then to Mr. Ruskin's charge, that it is both forced and untrue. What people perceive the soonest and praise the most are the more "sensational" of his effects o! light and shade. Seeing these, they think that they see all But it takes long to understand how much of consummate art there is in that real power of Rembrandt's how it is something much more than the mere brutal force of contrast. The violence of contrast is usually presented in interiors, especially in fancy subjects, - and when one passes to the landscapes, one ceases to remark it frequently. The disposition of light and shade is not less masterly in these but sometimes rather more - but its effect is less immediate. There are two exceptions: for we get the old familiar juxtaposition of strongest light and deepest dark in the "Grotto with a Brook"- here chiefly in the first state and we get it to some extent in the "Three Trees," which, though the lines of the sky are hard and wiry, is yet justly esteemed among the best of Rembrandt's landscapes, because of its extraordinary vigor and passion of storm, and because of that clear sense of space and open country which you have as you look at it. But for an example of the most subtle qualities of chiar-oscuro in Rembrandt, one must go back for an instant to the portraits, and look at the picture of Abraham Franz. He was a devoted amateur- - an example to all amateurs; for he denied himself many necessaries of life, so that he might possess a collection of great prints. Look at his portrait, in the first state only. He sits in a room just light enough for him to be able to examine his print, critically, lovingly, at his chosen station in the window. Behind him is a curtain, and across the curtain fall certain streaks of gentle sunlight, which are among the really greatest, most ordered, most restrained achievements of a master's art.

As a landscape-painter, Rembrandt was in advance of his age; or rather he had the courage to interpret the spirit of his own time and country. While Poussin still peopled his glades with gods and goddesses, and Claude set the shepherd and shepherdess of Arcadian days reclining in the cool shadows of his meadows, Rembrandt drew just such things as were before him whenever he went forth from Amsterdam to any neighboring village, trudging slowly along the high road, edged with stunted trees, or wandering by the side of the weary canal. Thus it is that at one point at least he touched the moderns, but at other points he was very far removed from them. If he sketched the woman going to market and the farmer on his horse, he did so because these objects happened to be before him and could give some animation to his landscapes. But he