By much the most delightful of the Christopher set of Rubens to my mind (and ego is introduced on these occasions, so that the opinion may pass only for my own, at the reader’s humble service to be received or declined,) is the “Presentation in the Temple:”  splendid in color, in sentiment sweet and tender, finely conveying the story.  To be sure, all the others tell their tale unmistakably—­witness that coarse “Salutation,” that magnificent “Adoration of the Kings” (at the Museum), by the same strong downright hands; that wonderful “Communion of St. Francis,” which, I think, gives the key to the artist’s faire better than any of his performances.  I have passed hours before that picture in my time, trying and sometimes fancying I could understand by what masses and contrasts the artist arrived at his effect.  In many others of the pictures parts of his method are painfully obvious, and you see how grief and agony are produced by blue lips, and eyes rolling blood shot with dabs of vermilion.  There is something simple in the practice.  Contort the eyebrow sufficiently, and place the eyeball near it,—­by a few lines you have anger or fierceness depicted.  Give me a mouth with no special expression, and pop a dab of carmine at each extremity—­and there are the lips smiling.  This is art if you will, but a very naive kind of art:  and now you know the trick, don’t you see how easy it is?

Tu quoque.—­Now you know the trick, suppose you take a canvas and see whether you can do it?  There are brushes, palettes, and gallipots full of paint and varnish.  Have you tried, my dear sir—­you who set up to be a connoisseur?  Have you tried?  I have—­and many a day.  And the end of the day’s labor?  O dismal conclusion!  Is this puerile niggling, this feeble scrawl, this impotent rubbish, all you can produce—­you, who but now found Rubens commonplace and vulgar, and were pointing out the tricks of his mystery?  Pardon, O great chief, magnificent master and poet!  You can do.  We critics, who sneer and are wise, can but pry, and measure, and doubt, and carp.  Look at the lion.  Did you ever see such a gross, shaggy, mangy, roaring brute?  Look at him eating lumps of raw meat—­positively bleeding, and raw and tough—­till, faugh! it turns one’s stomach to see him—­O the coarse wretch!  Yes, but he is a lion.  Rubens has lifted his great hand, and the mark he has made has endured for two centuries, and we still continue wondering at him, and admiring him.  What a strength in that arm!  What splendor of will hidden behind that tawny beard, and those honest eyes!  Sharpen your pen, my good critic, shoot a feather into him; hit him, and make him wince.  Yes, you may hit him fair, and make him bleed, too; but, for all that, he is a lion—­a mighty, conquering, generous, rampageous Leo Belgicus—­monarch of his wood.  And he is not dead yet, and I will not kick at him.