rt
of beer in an ugly mug, and the room would be filled with thick,
strong-smelling, cheap tobacco which he had sent to him from Holland,
and smoked in a small black clay pipe the whole day through.

"In his pictures, however, everything was so neat, clean, and accurate
that at the first glance there was not much to distinguish them from
those of the old masters--Netscher, Mieris, and Gerard Dow. But when
you looked closer you saw they betrayed a most eccentric vein, various
displays of a humour, which, however, chiefly delighted to disport
itself in caricature or parody. This was not the fashion then as now,
and therefore in Munich, where the pathetic or the simply naive was
still in the ascendant, Jan van Kuylen's too often profane performances
did not go down well. The first picture that he exhibited there was one
of Paradise, where Adam, a gaunt, lean, yellow-visaged fellow, was
digging the ground in the sweat of his brow, while Eve darned an old
jacket, and glanced up in evident ill-humour at the forbidden fruit,
while the first person of the Trinity looked smilingly over the hedge.
The picture was at once removed, for naturally the clergy took umbrage
at it. And indeed Jan did not fare much better with the second, which
also showed the cloven foot. He called it the Temptation of St.
Anthony. It is true that this new version widely departed from the
simple honest absence of all propriety with which the worthy Teniers
has illustrated the legend. A young peasant woman--evidently returning
from a wedding or christening feast, as she was carrying a basket
filled with meat, cakes, and a bottle of wine--had let herself be
induced by the cool of the evening hour, and probably her own heavy
head, to take a nap in the shade of the wood. St. Anthony, a very
sturdy youth, with his cowl thrown back, had evidently been coming
unsuspectingly along, and at the sudden sight stood rooted to the spot,
looking now at the young woman, now at the basket of good things, and
manifestly waging a violent warfare with his conscience, during which
he scratched his head in absurd perplexity. The expression of his face
was so irresistibly droll, that on this occasion even the clergy could
not avoid winking at it with a smile.

"But I have not yet mentioned the strangest part of it all: this Saint
in two minds, and the Adam in the picture of Paradise, were both exact
portraits of the painter himself. And this added immensely to the
drollery o