tures leave us no town-views taken from nature), we
occasionally meet views of town-gates, old houses alone or crowded
together, mills, all obviously sketched on account of a charm akin to
Rembrandt's nature but foreign to the greatest part of the lay population
of Amsterdam. Some illustrations will show the master's preferences: a
view on a little old bridge between compact houses, a spot called
_Grimnessesluis_, still forming nowadays, notwithstanding many later
alterations, one of the most typical views of old Amsterdam (_plate 5_).
We must here resist the temptation of reproducing some of Rembrandt's
drawings of picturesque towngates (like those in the Louvre, Ryksmuseum at
Amsterdam, the collections of M. Bonnat, the Duke of Devonshire, and
Teyler at Haarlem),(2) because these appear to have been done on an
excursion through the Netherlands, and cannot be identified with former
gates of Amsterdam; there is, however, another drawing, more closely
connected with landscape, giving a view of St. Anthony's Gate, quite near
Rembrandt's house, at the end of the street where he lived, taken from the
north outside the bulwark (_plate 6_). On the opposite side of the town
Rembrandt did that delightful sketch with the many mills in the foreground
(_plate 7_). In the city he again sketched a former fortification-tower,
called Montelbaenstoren (_plate 9_), showing to its right a perspective of
the harbour. We miss in this drawing the steeple, with which it had been
ornamented since 1606; the municipality had the good sense, when new
extensions were carried out in the beginning of the seventeenth century,
to preserve the old fortification-towers which became useless because of
the ramparts stretching farther, and to transform them into belfries by
giving them graceful steeples with carillons. Some of them, like the one
mentioned here, have lasted till our days; and when the stranger is kept
awake at night, in his hotel, by the gay clangor of their bells, he may
grumble at them, unused as he is to their music, but when he hears them in
daytime he should respect these three-centuries-old tones and meditate
like Rossetti, when he was impressed by Van Eyck's and Memling's works in
Bruges:--

The carillon, which then did strike
Mine ears, was heard of theirs alike;
It set me closer unto them.

[Plate 6. View of the Ramparts of Amsterdam, with the St. Anthony-Gate in
the Distance.]