as a general rule, the enjoyment of landscapes precedes that of figures, and expression strikes us sooner than form, while color comes last of all; but this differs with different temperaments.  I suppose there are few who do not feel a little stupid amusement at first at inaccuracies of costume and accessories in the older pictures, but we soon become as indifferent to them as the painters were themselves.  One grows so accustomed to see scriptural personages presented in the dress and surrounded by the architecture or landscape of Southern Europe of three centuries ago that the anachronism or inconsistency ceases to strike one.  Perhaps it is because armor and flowing robes, colonnades and branching trees, never seem out of keeping with events of a certain dignity.  I am not sure that the traveler ever becomes quite unconscious of the incongruity of the old Flemish dress and decorations, in most cases strongly enhanced by the prim composure which is the elementary expression of the earlier Netherlandish faces:  this is still discernible through all transitory emotions of fear, hate, love or anguish, and does not fail to produce very tragi-comic combinations.  I remember a group of a man in the dress of an Antwerp burgher sitting on a three-legged stool, with his head on the knee of a discreet-looking woman in a long-waisted, plain-skirted gown, with a high square bodice closed by a plaited neckerchief, her hair drawn tightly back under a close round cap, her pocket hanging from her girdle on one side, and on the other a small array of housewifery implements, among others a pair of scissors, with which she is clipping his locks:  her expression is so placid and thrifty withal that it seemed clear she was saving a penny for her goodman instead of sending him to the barber.  But this was not the painter’s idea:  the two were Samson and Delilah.  Better than this was a painting of Susannah and the elders, where the chaste Susannah is depicted clothed to the throat like a Dutch burgomaster’s wife, with a close cap and long veil, while her perilous ablutions are typified by a small wash-basin on the ground beside her.  Another almost as grotesque was a Massacre of the Innocents by Peter Breughel the Elder—­a snow-scene in the wide street of a red brick, high-gabled village—­soldiers, parents, children, all in the stiff, ungraceful Flemish dress of the sixteenth century, the poor little children, in square trousers and pinafores, clinging to their mothers’ narrow skirts.  Oddly enough, it made the story more real to me than it had ever seemed before, quite painfully and terribly so, indeed:  dispoiled of its usual conventional character, it became definite, and the very historical inaccuracy which destroyed the traditional conception made it an historical fact.  We have only to go to Ghent and Bruges to see how the genius and devout earnestness of the Van Eycks, Van der Heyden and Hemling raise their pictures above trifling absurdities.  It is undeniable that with many of us the constant presentation