man
who ought to have painted arquebusiers at all. Van der Heist and
Frans Hals are sinking to the level of gifted amateurs. Why did not
Rembrandt paint all the pictures? you begin to wonder. And yet the
Hals and the Van der Helsts were so good a little while ago.

Hals and Van der Helst are, however, to recover their own again; for
the "Night Watch," I am told, is to be moved to a building especially
erected for it, where the lighting will be more satisfactory than
connoisseurs now consider it. Perhaps it is as well. It is hard to
be so near the rose; and there are few pictures in the recesses of
the Gallery of Honour which the "Night Watch" does not weaken; some
indeed it makes quite foolish.

It is not of course really a night watch at all. Captain Franz
Banning Cocq's arquebusiers are leaving their Doelen in broad day;
the centralisation of sunlight from a high window led to the mistake,
and nothing now will ever change the title.

How little these careless gallant arquebusiers, who paid the
painter-man a hundred florins apiece to be included in the picture,
can have thought of the destiny of the work! Of Captain Franz Banning
Cocq as a soldier we know nothing, but as a sitter he is hardly second
to any in the world.

But it is not the "Night Watch" that I recall with the greatest
pleasure when I think of the Ryks Rembrandts. It is that wise and
serene old lady in the Van der Poll room--Elizabeth Bas--who sits there
for all time, unsurpassed among portraits. This picture alone is worth
a visit to Holland. I recall also, not with more pleasure than the
"Night Watch," but with little less, the superb group of syndics in the
Staalmeester room. It is this picture--with the "School of Anatomy"
at The Hague--that in particular makes one wish it had been possible
for all the Corporation pieces to have been from Rembrandt's brush. It
is this picture which deprives even Hals of some of his divinity, and
makes Van der Helst a dull dog. If ever a picture of Dutch gentlemen
was painted by a Dutch gentleman it is this.

Having seen the "Night Watch" again, it is a good plan to study the
Gallery of Honour. To pick out one's favourite picture is here not
difficult: it is No. 1501, "The Endless Prayer," by Nicolas Maes, of
which I have said something in the chapter on Dordrecht, the painter's
birthplace. Its place is very little below that of Elizabeth Bas,
by Maes's master.

It is always interesting in a fine gallery to as