being commissioned to paint a scriptural picture of the Red Sea
for a too parsimonious patron who had beaten him down and down, he
rebuked him for his meanness by producing a canvas entirely covered
with red paint. "But what is this?" the patron asked. "The Red
Sea--surely." "Where then are the Israelites?" "They have all crossed
over." "And Pharaoh's hosts?" "They are all drowned." The story is
perhaps an invention; but a somewhat similar joke is credited to Jan
Steen. His commission was the Flood, and his picture when finished
consisted of a sheet of water with a Dutch cheese in the midst
bearing the arms of Leyden. The cheese and the arms, he pointed out,
proved that people had been on the earth; as for Noah and the ark,
they were out of the picture.

Jan Steen's picture of "A Quaker's Funeral" I have not seen, but
according to Pilkington it is impossible to behold it and refrain from
laughter. The subject does not strike one as being in itself mirthful.

A century earlier Leyden had produced another Jan, separated from
Jan Steen by a difference wide asunder as the poles. Yet a very
wonderful man in his brief season, standing high among the world's
great madmen. I mean Jan Bockelson, the Anabaptist, known as Jan of
Leyden, who, beginning as pure enthusiast, succumbed, as so many a
leader of women has done, to the intoxication of authority, and became
the slave of grandiose ambition and excesses. Every country has had
its mock Messiahs: they rise periodically in England, not less at
the present day than in the darker ages (hysteria being more powerful
than light); yet the history of none of these spiritual monarchs can
compare with that of the tailor's son of Leyden.

The story is told in many places, but nowhere with such dramatic