The “Peace of Munster” has been called Terburg’s masterpiece:  but the girl in his “Paternal Advice,” No. 570 at the Ryks, seems to me a finer achievement.  The grace and beauty and truth of her pose and the miraculous painting of her dress are unrivalled.  Yet judged as a picture it is, I think, dull.  The colouring is dingy, time has not dealt kindly with the background; but the figure of the girl is perfect.  I give a reproduction opposite page 190.  It was this picture, in one of its replicas, that Goethe describes in his Elective Affinities:  a description which procured for it the probably inaccurate title “Parental Advice”.

We have a fine Terburg in our National Gallery—­“The Music Lesson”—­and here too is his “Peace of Munster,” which certainly was a great feat of painting, but which does not, I think, reproduce his peculiar characteristics and charm.  These may be found somewhere between “The Music Lesson” and the portrait next the Vermeer in the smallest of the three Dutch rooms.  Even more ingratiating than “The Music Lesson” is “The Toilet” at the Wallace Collection.  Terburg might be called a pocket Velasquez—­a description of him which will be appreciated at the Ryks Museum in the presence of his tiny and captivating “Helena van der Schalcke,” No. 573, one of the gems of the Cabinet pieces (see opposite page 290), and his companion pictures of a man and his wife, each standing by a piece of red furniture—­I think Nos. 574 and 575.  The execution of the woman’s muslin collar is among the most dexterous things in Dutch art.

From the Ryks Museum it is but a little way (past the model Dutch garden) to the Stedelijk Museum, where modern painting may be studied—­Israels and Bosboom, Mesdag and James Maris, Breitner and Jan van Beers, Blommers and Weissenbruch.

There is also one room dedicated to paintings of the Barbizon school, and of this I would advise instant search.  I rested my eyes here for an hour.  A vast scene of cattle by Troyon (who, such is the poverty of the Dutch alphabet, comes out monstrously upon the frame as Troijon); a mysterious valley of trees by Corot; a wave by Courbet; a mere at evening by Daubigny—­these are like cool firm hands upon one’s forehead.

The statement

    Nothing graceful, wise, or sainted,—­
    That is how the Dutchman painted,

is so sweeping as to be untrue.  Indeed it is wholly absurd.  The truth simply is that one goes to Dutch art for the celebration of fact without mystery or magic.  In other words, Dutch painting is painting without poetry; and it is this absence of poetry which makes the romantic Frenchmen appear to be such exotics when one finds them in Holland, and why it is so pleasant in Holland now and then to taste their quality, as one may at the Stedelijk Museum and in the Mesdag Collection at The Hague.