y connoisseurs to be finer than those of his master. We
are wiser to-day; yet Bol had a fine free way that is occasionally
superb, often united, as in the portrait of Dirck van der Waeijen at
Rotterdam, to a delicate charm for which Rembrandt cared little. His
portrait of an astronomer in our National Gallery is a great work,
and at the Ryks Museum at Amsterdam his "Roelof Meulenaer," No. 543,
should not be missed. Bol's favourite sitter seems to have been
Admiral de Ruyter--if one may judge by the number of his portraits
of that sea ravener which Holland possesses.

By a perversity of judgment Dort seems to be more proud of Ary Scheffer
than of any of her really great sons. It is Ary Scheffer's statue--not
Albert Cuyp's or Nicolas Maes's--which rises in the centre of the
town; and Ary Scheffer's sentimental and saccharine inventions fill
three rooms in the museum. It is amusing in the midst of this riot
of meek romanticism to remember that Scheffer painted Carlyle. Dort
has no right to be so intoxicated with the excitement of having given
birth to Scheffer, for his father was a German, a mere sojourner in
the Dutch town.

The old museum of Dort has just been moved to a new building in the
Lindengracht, and in honour of the event a loan exhibition of modern
paintings and drawings was opened last summer. The exhibition gave
peculiar opportunity for studying the work of G. H. Breitner, the
painter of Amsterdam canals. The master of a fine sombre impressionism,
Breitner has made such scenes his own. But he can do also more tender
and subtle things. In this collection was a little oil sketch of a
mere which would not have suffered had it been hung between a Corot
and a Daubigny; and a water-colour drawing of a few cottages and a
river that could not have been strengthened by any hand.

Another artist of Dort was Jan Terween Aertz, born in 1511,
whose carvings in the choir of the Groote Kerk are among its chief
glories. It is amazing that such spirit and movement can be suggested
in wood. That the very semblance of life can be captured by a painter
is wonderful enough; but there seems to me something more extraordinary
in the successful conquest of the difficulties which confront an artist
of such ambition as this Dort carver. His triumph is even more striking
than that of the sculptor in marble. The sacristan of Dort's Groote
Kerk seems more eager to show a brass screen and a gold christening
bowl than these astounding c