orld has ever known, and there are some who place him at the head of that
noble triumvirate who stand on the summit of the painters' Parnassus,
Velasquez, Titian, and Rembrandt. Having browsed and battened on Rembrandt,
and noted the countless cosmopolitan workers that for fifty years have been
excavating the country marked on the art map Rembrandt, you can perhaps
understand why our golfer likened the work of his commentators to the
incessant activity that his upturning of that grey, lichen-covered boulder
revealed.

[Illustration: THE HOLY FAMILY WITH THE ANGELS

1645. The Hermitage, St. Petersburg.]

But had our golfer, brimming with the modern passion for efficiency,
learned foreign tongues, and browsed in the musty archives, he would have
discovered that there was much to unlearn. The early scribes piled fancy
upon invention, believing or pretending that Rembrandt was a miser, a
profligate, a spendthrift, and so on. "Houbraken's facts," we read, "are
interwoven with a mass of those suspicious anecdotes which adorn the plain
tale of so many artistic biographies. Campo-Weyermann, Dargenville,
Descamps, and others added further embellishments, boldly piling fable upon
fable for the amusement of their readers, till legend gradually ousted
truth."

All this and much more he would have had to unlearn, discovering in the end
the simple truth that Rembrandt lived for his art; that he loved and was
kind to his wife and to the servant girl who, when Saskia died, filled her
place; that he was neither saint nor sinner; that he was extravagant
because beautiful things cost money; that being an artist he did not manage
his affairs with the wisdom of a man of the world; that he was hot-headed,
and played a hot-headed man's part in the family quarrels; and that he was
plucky and improvident, and probably untidy to the end, and that he did his
best work when the buffets of fate were heaviest.

The new era in Rembrandt literature began with Kolloff's _Rembrandt's Leben
und Werke_, published in 1854. This contribution to truth was followed by
the works of Messrs. Buerger and Vosmaer, by the lucubrations of other
meritorious bookworms, by the studies of Messrs. Bode and Bredius, and
finally by M. Emile Michel's Life, which is the definitive and standard
work on Rembrandt. Our golfer, whose French is a little rusty, was
delighted to find when he gave the order for this book that it had been
translated into English under the editors