y marking the muscles, by which they
thought to emulate the grandeur of Michel Angelo, and to exhibit their
learning by the choice of mythological and allegorical subjects, became
the aim of succeeding painters, and before these false and artificial
views of art, the spirit of religious enthusiasm and the pure, naive
perception of the truth and beauty of nature gradually disappeared.

"In proportion as the Flemish painters lost the proper conception of
form, and the feeling for delicacy and beauty of outline, it followed
of course that they became more and more removed from nature in their
desire to rival each other in the forced attitudes of their figures, and
in the exhibition of nudity, until at last such disgusting caricatures
were produced as we find in the works of Martin Heemskirk or Franz
Floris, artists who were even deficient in good colouring, the old
inheritance of the school.

"Some few painters, however, whose feeling for truth and nature repelled
them instinctively from a path so far removed from both, took to
portraying scenes of real life with considerable humour and vivacity; or
they delineated nature in her commonest aspects with great minuteness of
detail; and thus _tableaux de genre_ and landscape originated. Although
a few isolated efforts to introduce a better state of things were
visible towards the end of the sixteenth century, it was reserved for a
mind of no common power to bring about a complete revolution."

That Rubens was possessed of a "mind of no common power" will be readily
admitted. He was an extraordinary person, in whom were combined such a
variety of excellent qualities that there seems to have been no room
left in him for any of the inferior ones which are usually necessary, as
one must almost admit, for an alloy that will harden the finer metal for
the practical purposes of success. With all his feeling for religion, he
was seldom prudish; his amazing vitality never led him into excess or
intemperance. His intense patriotism was all for peace; classical
learning never made him dry or bumptious, nor the favour of kings
servile. As fine a gentleman as Buckingham, he had no enemies.

Something more than temperament and natural ability, however, was
necessary to make Rubens exactly what he turned out to be, and that was
environment. Had he remained in Flanders all his life we should have
been deprived of much that is most characteristic in his art. He was too
big, that is to say,