d by them, once and again, on delicate, difficult, private
embassies. But it was not only to his patrons that Rubens was endeared,
he was emphatically what men call 'a good fellow,' alike to superiors,
equals, and inferiors; a frank, honest, bountiful, and generous man. His
love of courts and their splendour was the chivalrous homage which a man
of his cast of mind paid to the dignity and picturesqueness of high
estate.

He married a year after his mother's death, when he was in his
thirty-third year. His first wife, Isabella Brant, was a connection of
his own (and so was his second wife). He built and painted, in fresco, a
fine house in Antwerp, and laid out a pleasant garden, which contained a
rotunda, filled with his collection of pictures by the Italian masters,
antique gems, etc. etc., already gathered abroad. He set himself to keep
house in a liberal fashion, to dispense benefits, and to entertain
friends--above all, to paint with might and main in company with his
great school, the members of which, like those of Raphael's school where
Raphael was concerned, were, for the most part, Rubens' devoted
comrades. Counting his work not only as the great object, but the great
zest of his life, never did painter receive such sweeping and
accumulating commissions, and never, even by Tintoret, were commissions
executed with such undaunted, unhesitating expedition.

Withal Rubens frequently left his studio and went abroad, either to act
as an unofficial ambassador, or to paint at the special request of some
foreign sovereign. Thus he was residing in Paris in 1620, planning for
Marie de Medici the series of remarkable pictures which commemorated her
marriage with Henry IV. (When I was a little girl, I went occasionally
to a country house, the show place of the neighbourhood, where there
were copies of this series of Rubens' pictures. I can remember yet
looking at them with utter bewilderment, caused by the dubious taste
that impelled Rubens to indulge in the oddest mixture of royal
personages, high church dignitaries, patron saints, and gods and
goddesses.) In 1628 Rubens was in Spain on a mission from his sovereign
to her kinsman, Philip IV.; in the following year he was in England, on
a service of a similar description to Charles I., from whom, even as
Rubens had already received it from King Philip, the painter had the
honour of knighthood.

In the mean time Rubens' first wife died, after a union of seventeen
years, in