ate and
pure.

The most curious florists of Holland were ambitious to supply the
Burgomaster van Storck with the choicest products of their skill for
the garden spread below the windows on either side of the portico, and
along the central avenue of hoary beeches which led to it. Naturally
this house, within a mile of the city of Haarlem, became a resort of
the artists, then mixing freely in great society, giving and receiving
[87] hints as to the domestic picturesque. Creatures of leisure--of
leisure on both sides--they were the appropriate complement of Dutch
prosperity, as it was understood just then. Sebastian the elder could
almost have wished his son to be one of them: it was the next best
thing to being an influential publicist or statesman. The Dutch had
just begun to see what a picture their country was--its canals, and
boompjis, and endless, broadly-lighted meadows, and thousands of miles
of quaint water-side: and their painters, the first true masters of
landscape for its own sake, were further informing them in the matter.
They were bringing proof, for all who cared to see, of the wealth of
colour there was all around them in this, supposably, sad land. Above
all, they developed the old Low-country taste for interiors. Those
innumerable genre pieces--conversation, music, play--were in truth the
equivalent of novel-reading for that day; its own actual life, in its
own proper circumstances, reflected in various degrees of
idealisation, with no diminution of the sense of reality (that is to
say) but with more and more purged and perfected delightfulness of
interest. Themselves illustrating, as every student of their history
knows, the good-fellowship of family life, it was the ideal of that
life which these artists depicted; the ideal of home in a country
where the preponderant interest of life, after all, could not well be
out of doors. Of the earth earthy--[88] genuine red earth of the old
Adam--it was an ideal very different from that which the sacred Italian
painters had evoked from the life of Italy, yet, in its best types, was
not without a kind of natural religiousness. And in the achievement of
a type of beauty so national and vernacular, the votaries of purely
Dutch art might well feel that the Italianisers, like Berghem, Boll,
and Jan Weenix went so far afield in vain.

The fine organisation and acute intelligence of Sebastian would have
made him an effective connoisseur of the arts, as he s