the phlegmatic Rembrandt a list to starboard must
have carried considerable ballast. Straightway on making Callot's
acquaintance he went forth with bags of coppers and made the acquaintance
of beggars. He did not have to travel far--"the Greeks were at his door."
The news spread, and each morning, the truthful Orles has told us, "there
were over four hundred beggars blocking the street that led to his
study," all willing to enlist in the cause of art. For six months
Rembrandt painted little beside "the ragged gentry." But he gradually
settled down on about ten separate and distinct types of abject
picturesqueness.

Ten years later, when he pictured the "Healing Christ," he introduced the
Leyden beggars, and these fixed types that he carried hidden in the cells
of his brain he introduced again and again in various pictures. In this
respect he was like all good illustrators: he had his properties, and by
new combinations made new pictures. Who has not noticed that every
painter carries in his kit his own distinct types--sealed, certified to,
and copyrighted by popular favor as his own personal property?

Can you mistake Kemble's "coons," Denslow's dandies, Remington's horses,
Giannini's Indians, or Gibson's "Summer Girl"? These men may not be
Rembrandts, but when we view the zigzag course art has taken, who dare
prophesy that this man's name is writ in water and that man's carved in
the granite of a mountain-side! Contemporary judgments usually have been
wrong. Did the chief citizens of Leyden in the year Sixteen Hundred
Thirty regard Rembrandt's beggars as immortal? Not exactly!

* * * * *

In Sixteen Hundred Thirty-one, Rembrandt concluded that his reputation in
the art-world of Holland was sufficient for him to go to Amsterdam and
boldly pit himself against De Keyser, Hals, Lastman and the rest. He had
put forth his "Lesson in Anatomy," and the critics and connoisseurs who
had come from the metropolis to see it were lavish in their praise. Later
we find him painting the subject again with another doctor handling the
tweezers and scalpel.

Rembrandt started for Amsterdam the second time--this time as a teacher,
not as a scholar. He rented an old warehouse on the canal for a studio.
It was nearly as outlandish a place as his former quarters in the mill at
Leyden. But it gave him plenty of room, was secluded, and afforded good
opportunity for experiments in light and shade.

He seemed