After all, every one likes to give his opinion: but who knows, if
Rembrandt could read all the pages that have been written to explain
the secret meanings of his art, whether he would not burst out
laughing? Such is the fate of men of genius: every one holds that he
has understood them better than his neighbor, and restores them in his
own way. They are like a beautiful theme given by God which men
distort into a thousand different meanings--a canvas upon which the
imagination of man paints and embroiders after its own manner.

I left the Hague Gallery with one desire ungratified: I had not found
in it any picture by Jerom Bosch, a painter born at Bois-le-Duc in the
fifteenth century. This madcap of mischief, this scarecrow of bigots,
this artistic sorcerer, had made my flesh creep first in the gallery
at Madrid with a work representing a horrible army of living skeletons
scattered about an immense space, in conflict with a motley crowd of
desperate and confused men and women, whom they were dragging into an
abyss where Death awaited them. Only from the diseased imagination of
a man alarmed by the terrors of damnation could such an extravagant
conception have issued. When you look at it, however long it may be
since you were afraid of phantoms, you feel a confused reawakening
dread. Such were the subjects of all his pictures--the tortures of the
accursed, spectres, fiery chasms, dragons, uncanny birds, loathsome
monsters, diabolical kitchens, sinister landscapes. One of these
frightful pictures was found in the cell where Philip II. died; others
are scattered throughout Spain and Italy. Who was this chimerical
painter? How did he live? What strange mania tormented him? No one
knows; he passed over the earth wrapped in a cloud, and disappeared
like an infernal vision.

On the first floor of the museum there is a "Royal Cabinet of
Curiosities," which contains some very precious historical relics,
besides a great number of different objects from China, Japan, and the
Dutch colonies. Amongst other things there is the sword of that Ruyter
who began life as a rope-maker at Vlissingen, and became the greatest
admiral of Holland; Admiral Tromp's cuirass perforated by bullets; a
chair from the prison of the venerated Barneveldt; a box containing a
lock of hair from the head of that Van Speyk who in 1831, on the
Schelde, blew up his vessel to preserve the honor of the Dutch flag.
Here, too, is the complete suit of clothes wor