even the ugly, and especially the ugly, they end by exaggerating even that, making defects into deformities and portraits into caricatures; they calumniate the national type; they give a burlesque and graceless aspect to the human countenance.  In order to have the proper background for such figures, they are constrained to choose trivial subjects:  hence the great number of pictures representing beer-shops, and drinkers with grotesque, stupid faces, in absurd attitudes; ugly women and ridiculous old men; scenes in which one can almost hear the brutal laughter and the obscene words.  Looking at these pictures, one would naturally conclude that Holland was inhabited by the ugliest and most ill-mannered people on the earth.  We will not speak of greater and worse license.  Steen, Potter, and Brouwer, the great Rembrandt himself, have all painted incidents that are scarcely to be mentioned to civilized ears, and certainly should not be looked at.  But even setting aside these excesses, in the picture galleries of Holland there is to be found nothing that elevates the mind, or moves it to high and gentle thoughts.  You admire, you enjoy, you laugh, you stand pensive for a moment before some canvas; but coming out, you feel that something is lacking to your pleasure, you experience a desire to look upon a handsome countenance, to read inspired verses, and sometimes you catch yourself murmuring, half unconsciously, “O Raphael!”

Finally, there are still two important excellences to be recorded of this school of painting:  its variety, and its importance as the expression—­the mirror, so to speak—­of the country.  If we except Rembrandt with his group of followers and imitators, almost all the other artists differ very much from one another; no other school presents so great a number of original masters.  The realism of the Dutch painters is born of their common love of nature:  but each one has shown in his work a kind of love peculiarly his own; each one has rendered a different impression which he has received from nature; and all, starting from the same point, which was the worship of material truth, have arrived at separate and distinct goals.  Their realism, then, inciting them to disdain nothing as food for the pencil, has so acted that Dutch art succeeds in representing Holland more completely than has ever been accomplished by any other school in any other country.  It has been truly said that should every other visible witness of the existence of Holland in the seventeenth century—­her period of greatness—­vanish from the earth, and the pictures remain, in them would be found preserved entire the city, the country, the ports, the ships, the markets, the shops, the costumes, the arms, the linen, the stuffs, the merchandise, the kitchen utensils, the food, the pleasures, the habits, the religious belief and superstitions, the qualities and effects of the people; and all this, which is great praise for literature, is no less praise for her sister art.