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. Bürger and Vosmaer, by the lucubrations of other
meritorious bookworms, by the studies of Messrs. Bode and Bredius, and
finally by M. Émile 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 editorship of Mr. Frederick Wedmore. It
was in the third edition.

He learned much from M. Émile Michel--among other things the herculean