active.

Reverence for the students of art, for the specialists, for the scientific
historians, was born within him as he pursued his studies in Rembrandt
lore. Also he was conscious of sorrow, anger, and pride: sorrow for the
artist of genius who goes down to his grave neglected, unwept, unhonoured,
and unsung: anger at the stupidity and blindness of his contemporaries:
pride at the unselfish industry and ceaseless activity of the men who, born
years after, raise the master to his throne.

[Illustration: A RABBI SEATED, A STICK IN HIS HANDS AND A HIGH FEATHER IN
HIS CAP

1645. The Hermitage, St. Petersburg.]

In the year 1669 an old Dutchman called Rembrandt dies in obscurity in
Amsterdam. So unmemorable was the death deemed that no contemporary
document makes mention of it. The passing of Rembrandt was simply noted,
baldly and briefly, in the death-register of the Wester Kerk: "Tuesday,
October 8, 1669; Rembrandt van Ryn, painter on the Roozegraft, opposite the
Doolhof. Leaves two children." Yet once, while he was alive, before he
painted _The Night Watch_, he had been the most famous painter in Holland.
Later, oblivion encompassed the old lion, and little he cared so long as he
could work at his art. Forty years after his death, Gerard de Lairesse, a
popular painter, now forgotten, wrote of Rembrandt--"In his efforts to
attain a yellow manner, Rembrandt merely achieved an effect of
rottenness.... The vulgar and prosaic aspects of a subject were the only
ones he was capable of noting." Poor Gerard de Lairesse!

To-day not a turn or a twist of his life, not a facet of his temperament,