is the perfect painter's vision--a scene grasped as a whole, character
searched out but not insistent, the most delicate suggestion of equally
diffused light knitting the figures together. He made no attempt to be
picturesque as in _The Night Watch_; he was content just to paint five men
dressed in black, with flat white collars and broad-brimmed hats, and a
servant. With these simple materials Rembrandt produced the picture that
the world has agreed to regard as his masterpiece. Contemporary criticism
says nothing about it. The place of honour at the Ryks Museum at Amsterdam
is given to _The Night Watch_, but it is _The Syndics of the Cloth Hall_--a
simple presentation of five grave men seated at a table--that we remember
with wonder and admiration.

Our enthusiast, having dwelt upon these three masterpieces, marking epochs
in Rembrandt's life, referred again to the magnificent array of portraits
scattered in such regal profusion through the thirty years that passed
between the painting of _The Anatomy Lesson_ and _The Syndics_. Then
noticing, while enlarging upon the etchings, that his mother was casting
anxious glances at the clock, he hurriedly referred to the last portrait
that Rembrandt painted of himself, two years before his death. He could not
describe this portrait, which is in a private collection in Berlin, as he
had never seen it, so he quoted M. Michel's description: "This
extraordinary work, perhaps the last Rembrandt painted, is modelled with
prodigious vigour and freedom. With superb audacity, the master shows us
once more the familiar features, on which age and sorrow have worked their
will. They are distorted, disfigured, almost unrecognisable. But the free
spirit is still unbroken. The eyes that meet ours are still keen and
piercing; they have even the old twinkle of good-humoured irony, and the
toothless mouth relaxes in frank laughter. What was the secret of this
gaiety? In spite of his poverty, he had still a corner in which to paint.
Beside him stand an easel and an antique bust, perhaps a relic of his