I wish we had more facts concerning him, for he must have been a great man and humorist.  The story is told of Hogarth that on 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 picturesqueness as by Professor Karl Pearson in his Ethic of Freethought.  “As the illegitimate son of a tailor in Leyden,” says Professor Pearson—­Jan’s mother was the maid of his father’s wife—­“his early life was probably a harsh and bitter one.  Very young he wandered from home, impressed with the miseries of his class and with a general feeling of much injustice in the world.  Four years he spent in England seeing the poor driven off the land by the sheep; then we find him in Flanders, married, but still in vague search of the Eldorado; again roaming, he visits Lisbon and Luebeck as a sailor, ever seeking and inquiring.  Suddenly a new light bursts upon him in the teaching of Melchior Hofmann [the Anabaptist]; he fills himself with dreams of a glorious kingdom on earth, the rule of justice and of love.  Still a little while and the prophet Mathys crosses his path, and tells him of the New Sion and the extermination of the godless.”