y--out of which the only records which reach us,
are stories of miserly habits acquired too late to serve their purpose,
a desperate resort to low company dating from his first wife's death,
and his gradual downfall.

Rubens and Rembrandt have been sometimes contrasted as the painters of
light and of darkness; the contrast extended to their lives.

It will read like a humorous anti-climax after so sad a history, when I
add that no other painter painted his own likeness so often as Rembrandt
painted his. In the engraving before me the face is heavy and
stolid-seeming enough to be that of a typical Dutchman. The eye-brows
are slightly knit over the broad nose; the full lips are scantily shaded
by a moustache; there is no hair on the well-fleshed cheeks and double
chin. Rembrandt wears a flat cap and ear-rings. He has two rows of a
chain across his doublet, and one hand thrust beneath the cloak hanging
across his breast.

Rembrandt's great merits were his strong truthfulness, and his almost
equally powerful sense of a peculiar kind of picturesqueness. It seems
as if the German weirdness perceptible in Albrecht Duerer had in
Rembrandt taken a homelier, but a more comprehensible and effective
Dutch form. Kugler argues, that the long winter, with its short dark
days, of Northern Europe produces in its inhabitants instinctive delight
in hearth-warmth and light, and that the pleasure in looking at
Rembrandt's pictures is traceable to this influence. It is in scenes by
fire-light, camp-light, torch-light, that he triumphs, and his somewhat
grim but very real romance owes its origin to the endless suggestions of
the deep black shadows which belong to these artificial lights. There is
this objection to be urged to the theory, that Rembrandt was also a good
painter of his own flat Dutch landscape, painting it, however, rather
under the sombre dimness of clouds and tempests than in the brightness
of sunshine. But whatever its source, there is a charm so widely felt in
that wonderfully perfect surrounding of uncertainty, suspicion, and
alarm, with which Rembrandt has encompassed so many of his otherwise
prosaic, coarse, and sometimes vulgar Dutch men and women, that we have
coined a new word to express the charm, and speak of groups and
incidents being _Rembrandtesque_, as we speak of their being
picturesque.

Rembrandt did not always leave the vague thrill of doubt, terror, or
even horror, which he sought to produce, to imaginat