over the canvas.  Isabel or Helena, wife No. 1 or No. 2, are sitting by, buxom, exuberant, ready to be painted; and the children are boxing in the corner, waiting till they are wanted to figure as cherubs in the picture.  Grave burghers and gentlefolks come in on a visit.  There are oysters and Rhenish always ready on yonder table.  Was there ever such a painter?  He has been an ambassador, an actual Excellency, and what better man could be chosen?  He speaks all the languages.  He earns a hundred florins a day.  Prodigious!  Thirty-six thousand five hundred florins a year.  Enormous!  He rides out to his castle with a score of gentlemen after him, like the Governor.  That is his own portrait as St. George.  You know he is an English knight?  Those are his two wives as the two Maries.  He chooses the handsomest wives.  He rides the handsomest horses.  He paints the handsomest pictures.  He gets the handsomest prices for them.  That slim young Van Dyck, who was his pupil, has genius too, and is painting all the noble ladies in England, and turning the heads of some of them.  And Jordaens—­what a droll dog and clever fellow!  Have you seen his fat Silenus?  The master himself could not paint better.  And his altar-piece at St. Bavon’s?  He can paint you anything, that Jordaens can—­a drunken jollification of boors and doxies, or a martyr howling with half his skin off.  What a knowledge of anatomy!  But there is nothing like the master—­nothing.  He can paint you his thirty-six thousand five hundred florins’ worth a year.  Have you heard of what he has done for the French Court?  Prodigious!  I can’t look at Rubens’s pictures without fancying I see that handsome figure swaggering before the canvas.  And Hans Hemmelinck at Bruges?  Have you never seen that dear old hospital of St. John, on passing the gate of which you enter into the fifteenth century?  I see the wounded soldier still lingering in the house, and tended by the kind gray sisters.  His little panel on its easel is placed at the light.  He covers his board with the most wondrous, beautiful little figures, in robes as bright as rubies and amethysts.  I think he must have a magic glass, in which he catches the reflection of little cherubs with many-colored wings, very little and bright.  Angels, in long crisp robes of white, surrounded with halos of gold, come and flutter across the mirror, and he draws them.  He hears mass every day.  He fasts through Lent.  No monk is more austere and holy than Hans.  Which do you love best to behold, the lamb or the lion? the eagle rushing through the storm, and pouncing mayhap on carrion; or the linnet warbling on the spray?