sublimated essence of comedy. Teniers, Ostade, Brouwer are coarse and
boorish beside him; Metsu and Mieris genteel. Even when he is painting
low life Jan Steen is distinguished, a gentleman. And now and then
he touches the springs of tears, so exquisite in his sympathetic
understanding. He remains the most lovable painter in Holland, and
the tenderest--in a country where tenderness is not easily found.

Look, for example, at the two pictures at The Hague which are
reproduced opposite pages 74 and 80. The first represents the Steen
family. The jolly Jan himself is smoking at the table; the old brewer
and the elder Mrs. Steen are in the foreground. I doubt if any picture
exists in which the sense of innocent festivity is better expressed. It
is all perhaps rather a muddle: Mrs. Steen has some hard work before
her if the house is to be restored to a Dutch pitch of cleanliness
and order; but how jolly every one is! Jan himself looks just as we
should expect.

The triumph of the "Oyster Feast," on the opposite page, seems to me to
be the girl kneeling in the corner. Here is drawing indeed. The charge
brought by the mysterious painter in Balzac's story against Pourbus,
that one was unable to walk behind the figure in his picture, could
never hold with Jan Steen. His every figure stands out surrounded
by atmosphere, and never more so than in the "Oyster Feast". Again,
in the "Cat's Dancing Lesson" (opposite page 158), what drawing there
is in the girl playing the pipe, and what life in the whole scene!

It is odd that Jan Steen in Holland, and George Morland in England,
both topers, should have had this secret of simple charm so highly
developed: one of nature's curious ironies, very confusing to the
moralist. In the second Hague picture (opposite page 80) Leyden's