shut us up in an iron cage, and send us round through the land, charge the curious folk a few pence to see us, and thou wilt soon gather together all thy heart’s desire.’  The jest is grim, but the king of Sion has the advantage of his grace the bishop.  Then follows torture, but there is little to extract, for the king still holds himself an instrument sent by God—­though it were for the punishment of the world.  Sentence is read on these men—­placed in an iron cage they shall be shown round the bishop’s diocese, a terrible warning to his subjects, and then brought back to Muenster; there with glowing pincers their flesh shall be torn from the bones, till the death-stroke be given with red-hot dagger in throat and heart.  For the rest let the mangled remains be placed in iron cages swung from the tower of St. Lambert’s Church.

“On the 26th of January, 1536, Jan Bockelson and Knipperdollinch meet their fate.  A high scaffolding is erected in the market-place, and before it a lofty throne for his grace the bishop, that he may glut his vengeance to the full.  Let the rest pass in silence.  The most reliable authorities tell us that the Anabaptists remained calm and firm to the last.  ‘Art thou a king?’ ‘Art thou a bishop?’ The iron cages still hang on the church tower at Muenster; placed as a warning, they have become a show; perhaps some day they will be treasured as weird mentors of the truth which the world has yet to learn from the story of the Kingdom of God in Muenster.”

A living German artist of great power, named Joseph Sattler, too much of whose time has recently been given to designing book-plates, produced some few years ago an extraordinary illustrated history of the Anabaptists in Muenster.  Many artists have essayed to portray madness, but I know of no work more terrible than his.

We have travelled far from Leyden’s peaceful studios.  It is time to look at the work of Gerard Dou.  Rembrandt we have seen was the son of a miller, Jan Steen of a brewer; the elder Dou was a glazier.  His son Gerard was born in Leyden in 1613.  The father was so far interested in the boy’s gifts that he apprenticed him to an engraver when he was nine.  At the age of eleven he passed to the studio of a painter on glass, and on St. Valentine’s day, 1628, he became a pupil of Rembrandt.  From Rembrandt, however, he seems to have learned only the charm of contrasts of light and shade.  None of the great rugged strength of the master is to be seen in his minute and patient work, in which the genius of taking pains is always apparent.  “He would frequently,” says Ireland, “paint six or seven days on a hand, and, still more wonderful, twice the time on the handle of a broom....  The minuteness of his performance so affected his sight that he wore spectacles at the age of thirty.”

Gerard Dou’s success was not only artistic; it was also financial.  Rembrandt’s prices did not compare with those of his pupil, whose art coming more within the sympathetic range and understanding of the ordinary man naturally was more sought after than the Titanic and less comfortable canvasses of the greater craftsman.