o had beaten him down and down, he
rebuked him for his meanness by producing a canvas entirely covered
with red paint. "But what is this?" the patron asked. "The Red
Sea--surely." "Where then are the Israelites?" "They have all crossed
over." "And Pharaoh's hosts?" "They are all drowned." The story is
perhaps an invention; but a somewhat similar joke is credited to Jan
Steen. His commission was the Flood, and his picture when finished
consisted of a sheet of water with a Dutch cheese in the midst
bearing the arms of Leyden. The cheese and the arms, he pointed out,
proved that people had been on the earth; as for Noah and the ark,
they were out of the picture.

Jan Steen's picture of "A Quaker's Funeral" I have not seen, but
according to Pilkington it is impossible to behold it and refrain from
laughter. The subject does not strike one as being in itself mirthful.

A century earlier Leyden had produced another Jan, separated from
Jan Steen by a difference wide asunder as the poles. Yet a very
wonderful man in his brief season, standing high among the world's
great madmen. I mean Jan Bockelson, the Anabaptist, known as Jan of
Leyden, who, beginning as pure enthusiast, succumbed, as so many a
leader of women has done, to the intoxication of authority, and became
the slave of grandiose ambition and excesses. Every country has had
its mock Messiahs: they rise periodically in England, not less at
the present day than in the darker ages (hysteria being more powerful
than light); yet the history of none of these spiritual monarchs can
compare with that of the tailor's son of Leyden.

The story is told in many places, but nowhere with such dramatic
picturesqueness as by Professor Karl Pearson in his _Ethic of
Freethought_. "As the illegitimate son of a tailor in Leyden,"
says Professor Pearson--Jan's mother was the maid of his father's
wife--"his early life was probably a harsh and bitter one. Very young
he wandered from home, impressed with the miseries of his class and
with a general feeling of much injustice in the world. Four years he
spent in England seeing the poor driven off the land by the sheep;
then we find him in Flanders, married, but still in vague search of
the Eldorado; again roaming, he visits Lisbon and Luebeck as a sailor,
ever seeking and inquiring. Suddenly a new light bursts upon him in
the teaching of Melchior Hofmann [the Anabaptist]; he fills himself
with dreams of a glorious kingdom on earth, the rule