ncerity
of which failed to impress the Dutch amateurs. Even portraiture, an art
where sincerity is so indispensable, felt the effects of the people's
blindness, and in the last years of Rembrandt's life we see those
portrait-painters coming to the fore, who did away with true expression of
character and joined the private burghers in their decadent predilection
for artificiality in dress and appearance.

It is not to be wondered at, that on this fertile Amsterdam soil intellect
and art blossomed splendidly in other ways also. Music was in great
favour and could boast a celebrity: Sweelinck, the organist and composer.
Besides this there was a great literary movement; to emphasize its
importance it suffices to say that half of the literary productions of the
Netherlands in the seventeenth century were by Amsterdam writers. The
ordinary public was rather slow in recognising their merits, and as a rule
only estimated poetry when it had an edifying and moralising tendency. A
practical use was made of the poets, when pithy verses or inscriptions for
gables or institutions were needed and when wedding-parties, births and
deaths, necessitated the scarcely ever failing poems. Nevertheless highly
meritorious and lasting work was produced by the popular poets, such as
Brederode and Starter, and Samuel Coster, who founded in 1617 the first
permanent theatre (de Duytsche Akademie, i.e. the Dutch Academy), the more
refined and classically educated Hooft, who, like Gerard Brandt, also
produced excellent prose, the genial and universal Vondel, the greatest of
all, and the poets of less originality like Andries Pels, Reyer Anslo (not
to be confuted with Rembrandt's friend the clergyman Cornelis Claesz.
Anslo), Jan Vos, Jan Hz. Krul, Jeremias de Decker, passing over in silence
those of a subsequent generation. Only the last three are known to have
been on intimate terms with Rembrandt; no traces appear in the artist's
work of any friendly relation with the others, especially with the great
Vondel, and on this ground we may safely say that such a relation is not
very likely to have existed, because the hard-working painter had a homely
life, and all relations he had with lending men of his time generally
reflect themselves either in his pictures, drawings, or etchings. Amoug
the latter we meet one person whom we should not omit, because he is the
representative of another class of people than we have mentioned above,
namely Jan Six,