Had this proposition come a few years before, the proud painter would
have flouted it. But things were changed. Twinges of gout and sharp
touches of sciatica backed up the King's argument that to reform were the
part of wisdom. Van Dyck's manly shape was tending to embonpoint: he had
evolved a double chin, the hair on his head was rather seldom, and he
could no longer run upstairs three steps at a time. Yes, he would get
married, live the life of a staid, respectable citizen, and paint only
religious subjects. Society was nothing to him--he would give it up
entirely.

And so Sir Anthony Van Dyck was married to Maria Ruthven, at Saint Paul's
Cathedral, and the King gave the bride away, ceremonially and in fact.

Sir Anthony's gout grew worse, and after some months the rheumatism took
an inflammatory turn. Other complications entered, which we would now
call Bright's Disease--that peculiar complaint of which poor men stand in
little danger.

The King offered the Royal Physician a bonus of five hundred pounds if he
would cure Van Dyck: but if he had threatened to kill the doctor if the
patient died, just as did the Greek friends of Byron, when the poet was
ill at Rome, it would have made no difference.

A year after his marriage, and on the day that Maria Ruthven gave birth
to a child, Anthony Van Dyck died, aged forty years. Rubens had died but
a few months before.

The fair Scottish wife did not care to retain her illustrious name at the
expense of loneliness, and so shortly married again. Whom she married
matters little, since it would require a search-warrant to unearth even