brother John six years after Hubert's death. When one
thinks of the intense application and devotion which such a work costs,
and recalls the bronze gates of St John that occupied Lorenzo Ghiberti
49 years, and when we read, as we shall read a few chapters farther on,
of large paintings which were begun and ended in so many days--even so
many hours, one can better understand what is the essential difference
between the works of the early and the later painters, a difference
which no skill, no power even can bridge over. John Van Eyck, who had
lived late enough to have departed from the painting of sacred pictures
alone, so that he left portraits and an otter hunt among his works, is
three times represented in our National Gallery, in three greatly
esteemed portraits, one a double portrait, believed to be the likenesses
of the painter and his wife, standing hand in hand with a terrier dog
at their feet.

Gossaert, called de Mabuse from his native town of Mabeuze, sometimes
signing his name Joannes Malbodius, followed in the steps of the Van
Eycks, particularly in his great picture of the 'Adoration of the
Kings,' which is at Castle Howard, the seat of the Earl of Carlisle.
Mabuse was in England and painted the children of Henry VII, in a
picture, which is at Hampton Court. There is a picture in the palace of
Holyrood, Edinburgh, which has been attributed to Mabuse. It represents
on the sides of a triptych or diptych (somewhat like a folding screen)
James III. and his queen with attendants. The fur on the queen's dress
displays already that marvellous technical skill for which Flemish
painting is so celebrated.

Hans Memling belonged to Bruges. There is a tradition of him, which is
to a certain extent disproven, that he was a poor soldier relieved by
the hospital of St John, Bruges, and that in gratitude he executed for
the hospital the well-known reliquary of St Ursula. However it might
have originated, this is the most noted work of a painter, who was
distinguished frequently by his minute missal-like painting (he was also
an illuminator of missals), in which he would introduce fifteen hundred
small figures in a picture two feet eight inches, by six feet five
inches in size, and work out every detail with the utmost niceness and
care. The reliquary, or 'chasse,' is a wooden coffer or shrine about
four feet in length, its style and form those of a rich Gothic church,
its purpose to hold an arm of the saint. The whole e