artist of genius who goes down to his grave neglected, unwept, unhonoured,
and unsung: anger at the stupidity and blindness of his contemporaries:
pride at the unselfish industry and ceaseless activity of the men who, born
years after, raise the master to his throne.

[Illustration: A RABBI SEATED, A STICK IN HIS HANDS AND A HIGH FEATHER IN
HIS CAP

1645. The Hermitage, St. Petersburg.]

In the year 1669 an old Dutchman called Rembrandt dies in obscurity in
Amsterdam. So unmemorable was the death deemed that no contemporary
document makes mention of it. The passing of Rembrandt was simply noted,
baldly and briefly, in the death-register of the Wester Kerk: "Tuesday,
October 8, 1669; Rembrandt van Ryn, painter on the Roozegraft, opposite the
Doolhof. Leaves two children." Yet once, while he was alive, before he
painted _The Night Watch_, he had been the most famous painter in Holland.
Later, oblivion encompassed the old lion, and little he cared so long as he
could work at his art. Forty years after his death, Gerard de Lairesse, a
popular painter, now forgotten, wrote of Rembrandt--"In his efforts to
attain a yellow manner, Rembrandt merely achieved an effect of
rottenness.... The vulgar and prosaic aspects of a subject were the only
ones he was capable of noting." Poor Gerard de Lairesse!

To-day not a turn or a twist of his life, not a facet of his temperament,
not an individual of his family, friends, or acquaintances, not the
slightest scrap of paper bearing the mark of his hand, but has been peered
into, scrutinised, tracked to its source, and written about voluminously.
The bibliography of Rembrandt would fill a library. Several lengthy and
learned catalogues of his works have been published in volumes so large
that a child could not lift one of them. His 450 pictures, his
multitudinous drawings, his 270 etchings, their authenticity, their
history, their dates, the identification of his models, have been the
subjects of innumerable books and essays. Why, it would have taken our
golfer three months just to read what has been written about one of
Rembrandt's pictures--that known as _The Night Watch_. He might have begun
with Bredius and Meyer of Holland, and M. Durand-Greville of France, and
would then have been only at the beginning of his task. People make the
long journey to St. Petersburg for the sake of the 35 pictures by Rembrandt
that the Hermitage contains. He is hailed to-day as the greatest etcher the
w