labour that is necessary if one desires to write a standard and definitive
book on a subject. Not only did M. Michel visit and revisit all the
galleries where Rembrandt's pictures are displayed in Russia, France,
England, Sweden, Denmark, and North Germany, but he lived for several years
with Rembrandt, surrounded by reproductions of his pictures, drawings, and
etchings, and by documents bearing on their history, his mind all the while
intently fixed on the facts of Rembrandt's life and the achievements of his
genius. Gradually the procession of dates and facts took on a new
significance; the heterogeneous threads of information wove themselves into
the fabric of a life. M. Michel is the recoverer-in-chief of all that truly
happened during the sixty-three years that Rembrandt passed upon this
earth.

Every dead painter, poet, or writer of genius, has had his Recoverer. A
searchlight has flashed upon all that Charles Lamb said, did, or wrote.
Every forerunner who inspired Keats, from the day when he took the _Faerie
Queene_ like a fever, and went through it "as a young horse through a
spring meadow, romping," has been considered and analysed. You could bury
Keats and Lamb in the tomes that have been written about them. With the
books of his commentators you could raise a mighty monument of paper and
bindings to Rembrandt.

All this is very right and most worthy of regard. We do not sing "For they
are jolly good fellows" in their honour, but we offer them our profound
respect and gratitude. And our golfer, in his amateurish way, belongs to
the tribe. He has approached Rembrandt through books. His temperament
enjoyed exploring the library hive marked Rembrandt. Now he feels that he
must study the works of the master, and while he is cogitating whether he
shall first examine the 35 pictures at St. Petersburg, or the 20 in the
Louvre, or the 20 at Cassel, or the 17 at Berlin, or the 16 at Dresden, or