rom a monastery on the coast, whither the sea had borne
the hulk of the vessel with the pictures, which were unharmed. These
the monks considered admirable. Thus was Cornelisz sheltered,
welcomed, and stimulated to paint, and the profound emotions
occasioned by the wreck gave his genius such a new and powerful
impulse that he became a real artist. Another, Hans Fredeman, the
famous trick painter who painted some columns on the frame of a
drawing-room door so cleverly that Charles V. turned round to look as
soon as he had entered, and thought that the walls had suddenly closed
behind him by enchantment,--this Hans Fredeman, who painted palisades
that made people turn back, doors which people attempted to open, owed
his fortune to a book on architecture by Vitruvius which he obtained
by chance from a carpenter.

There is a good little picture by Steen which represents a doctor
pretending to operate on a man who imagines himself to be sick: an old
woman is holding a basin, the invalid is shrieking desperately, and a
few curious neighbors, convulsed with laughter, look on from a window.

When one says that this picture makes one break into an irresistible
peal of laughter, one has said all that is necessary. After Rembrandt,
Steen is the most original figure-painter of the Dutch school; he is
one of those few artists whom, when once known, whether they are or
are not congenial to our taste, we must perforce admire as great
painters, and even if we consider them worthy of only secondary
honors, it matters not, they remain indelibly impressed on our minds.
After one has seen Steen's pictures it is impossible to see a
drunkard, a buffoon, a cripple, a dwarf, a deformed face, a ridiculous
smirk, a grotesque attitude, without remembering one of his figures.
All the degrees of stupidity and of drunkenness, all the grossness and
mawkishness of orgies, the frenzy of the lowest pleasures, the
cynicism of the vulgarest vice, the buffoonery of the wildest rabble,
all the most brutal emotions, the basest aspects of tavern and
alehouse life, have been painted by him with the brutality and
insolence of an unscrupulous man, and with such a sense of the comic,
such an impetuosity, such an intoxication of inspiration, one might
say that words cannot express the effect produced. Writers have
devoted many volumes to him, and have advanced many different opinions
about him. His warmest admirers have attributed to him a moral
purpose--that of