e luxurious, and towards the end of Rembrandt's life we see a
complete change effected: we may say that when the architects preferably
imitated the Italian Palladio or the French Mansart, and when the feebler
painters followed the degenerating taste of the public,-- then the leading
classes took to French fashions, and wigs came into use. Rembrandt's
pictures show us sufficiently that he kept aloof from this deplorable but
fated change, and we must imagine him moving within the classes which
remained loyal to the solid habits of the first period of his life in
Amsterdam.

Mingling with this traffic we find the children amusing themselves,
venting their love of ridicule and, above all things, fighting, in those
parts from which they were later on banished on account of a more regular
education, or because of certain districts turning into exclusive shop- or
office-quarters. Their playfulness fell again and again into wild
excesses, which forced the magistrate to pass prohibitive laws, in order
to protect citizens from injury and damage. Add to this the great number
of beggars, peasant-people, many of them, impoverished by the wars,
bohemians, highwaymen, remnants of army-trains, all flocking to the great
centre in the hope of finding assistance, strolling musicians,
quacksalvers and mountebanks at market time (_plate 26_), periodic parades
of gaily-dressed civic guards. Add to this the fairs, and we shall have
completed in our imagination a scene which is of the liveliest, and
certainly of a far greater charm and variety than our present more
monotonous and regulated existence. Rembrandt's [Plate 25. Children
Refore A Street Door: The One In The Middle With A "Rommelpot"]

Plate 25. Children Refore A Street Door: The One In The Middle With A
"Rommelpot". After the drawing by Rembrandt, in the British Museum, London

etchings and drawings give us numerous little illustrations in this
respect, as may be seen from the superb drawing lately added to the
British Museum by the Salting bequest, showing children going about with
the star (a structure of oiled paper on a stick, lit from behind with a
candle) on Epiphany-evening, and singing before the houses, as they also
did, some months later, on Shrove Tuesday, accompanying their songs with
the rommelpot, a musical instrument well known from Hals's pictures, and
consisting of an earthenware pot, covered with parchment or bladder,
through which a stick was mov