childhood displayed in his works, shows that with all his eccentricities there was something good in his nature; and, indeed, unless that be the case, I doubt the power of any artist, whatever may be his genius, to interest us deeply. I know not that any other painter combines such completion of finish at so apparently small an expense of labour as Jan Steen, in his best pictures. But haste, perhaps occasioned by his necessities, towards the close of his life, made him throw off works which, though they might have made the reputation of other men, are scarcely worthy of him. His pictures have, more than those of most painters, an apparent artlessness of contrivance,-the result not of ignorance, but of that originality which, disregarding common rules, works out its purposes by methods of its own, and yet faultlessly. Jan Steen seems, indeed, from the unmistakable evidences of rapidity his works present, to have had the whole of his art, not only always present in his mind, but at his fingers' ends. He seems to have painted as quickly and as surely as Shakspeare is said to have written. Others have, no doubt, equalled him in this, but who with such results ?-excepting only a still greater genius-Rubens.

Slight in execution as are some of his late works, there are early pictures by him, and some of these are in Her Majesty's collection, as highly finished as the most elaborate of Gerard Dow, and with a much finer taste. The excellence of his colour has been pointed out by Reynolds; but there is one point in which he as well as the other Dutch painters are the best possible guides. Mr. Ruskin has noticed that

"modern painters in general have not a proper sense of the value of dirt; cottage children never appear but in freshly got-up caps and aprons, and white-handed beggars excite compassion in unexceptionable rags.” Now it is very easy to make everything look dirty, and there are styles of bad colouring that cannot avoid doing so, and in which Venus herself, rising from the sea, will seem to stand in need of washing. But it is no paradox to say that even dirt should not be painted to look dirty, and this is exactly what colourists like Jan Steen understood. Hence their pictures, even when their subjects are from the lowest condition of humanity, are not, in respect to colour, repulsive, however so in their incidents; but, without anything of that clean look in the dresses, persons, and furniture, of their pictures, that would be out of character, and also without the monotony or wretchedness of dirty colour, their negative hues, which fill their largest masses, are here and there contrasted by small portions of red, orange, or other bright colours, that, so surrounded, glow like gems.

How they managed this I do not know; I can only point out the result, which is one of the charms of Ostade, who, more than any other painter, resembles Rembrandt, in his admiration (for so it seems) of. human ugliness and deformity, and who often, as Rembrandt sometimes did, carries us into scenes which we would not willingly enter in real life, but which he adorns with all the charms of Art, and often with traits of domestic interest, by which he penetrates to the heart, to where the tedious mechanism of Gerard Dow never yet reached. The hard-working, and there