cts of the whispering monks of Florence
(Heaven forbid that it should not be so, since the most of us
cannot be monks, but must be ploughmen and reapers still). And
are we to suppose there is no nobility in Rubens' masculine and
universal sympathy with all this, and with his large human
rendering of it, gentleman though he was by birth, and feeling,
and education, and place, and, when he chose, lordly in
conception also? He had his faults--perhaps great and lamentable
faults,--though more those of his time and his country than his
own; he has neither cloister-breeding nor boudoir-breeding, and
is very unfit to paint either in missals or annuals; but he has
an open sky and wide-world breeding in him that we may not be
offended with, fit alike for king's court, knight's camp, or
peasants cottage.'

Rubens' works are very many, nearly four thousand pictures and sketches
being attributed to him and his scholars. Many are still at Antwerp,
many at Madrid, but most are at Munich, where, in one great saloon and
cabinet, there are ninety-five pictures by Rubens. In England, at
Blenheim, there are fifteen pictures by Rubens, as the great Duchess of
Marlborough would give any price for his works. I can only indicate a
very few examples in the different branches of art which he made his
own.

First, of his 'Descent from the Cross:' it is a single large group,
distinguished by luminous colouring and correct drawing, and with regard
to which the mass of white sheet against which the body of Christ is in
relief in the picture, has been regarded as a bold artistic venture. An
enthusiastic admirer has called it 'a most wonderful monument of the
daring genius of the painter. The grandest picture in the world for
composition, drawing, and colouring.' Its defects are held to be 'the
bustle of the incidents and the dreadfully true delineation of merely
physical agony--too terrible, real, picturesque, but not sublime--- an
earthly tragedy, not a divine mystery.'

'Remit the anguish of that lighted stare;
Close those wan lips! let that thorn-wounded brow
Stream not with blood.'

There is a tradition that an accident happened to the picture while
Rubens was painting it, and that Van Dyck remedied the accident by
re-painting the cheek and chin of the Virgin and the arm of the
Magdalene.

With regard to another picture of Rubens at Antwerp, 'The Assumption of
the Virgin,'