The Van Dyke portraits of Queen Henrietta Maria, Charles I. and the children of Charles I. are mutely eloquent. The well-known picture, “Baby Stuart”, a detail from the group, “Children of Charles I.” suggests the high tide of love and happiness in the life of Queen Henrietta Maria. She was then surrounded by everything that heart could desire,--wealth, honor, power, a husband’s unbounded love and confidence and three beautiful and most promising children. They were Mary, who later married William, Prince of Orange; Charles, who, at the Restoration, became the “Merry Monarch” of England, and James, the baby Stuart, who later became the unfortunate James II., the monarch who lost his crown, and whose daughter Mary, wedded to her cousin, William, Prince of Orange, son of that sister Mary, who, in the portrait, stands at his side, abetted the deposition of her father and wore his crown. There is something eloquently pathetic in the portraits of men and women who have fallen victims to a tragic fate. The principle of contrast is, doubtless, here at work, setting side by side with the hour of portrayal that other hour of bitter death. Marie Antoinette and her children, as fixed upon canvas by the court painter, Madame Vigee LeBrun, derive their rich tonal qualities--warm grays and reds, their charm of evanescence, their magically somber fascination, from the shadows of the Conciergerie and the guillotine. The portrait of Charles I. as painted by Van Dyke, must ever suggest to the thoughtful student of history that scene, disgraceful alike to the English nation and to human nature which took place on the scaffold just outside Whitehall Palace. Yes; there are two sides to every question, and one is a ruler exercising arbitrary power and impregnated with belief in the divine right of kings and claiming it his prerogative to break up his parliament and govern alone; the other is an assembly of men, nominally a parliament, so narrowly fanatic and steeped in human hate that they demanded as condition under which they would agree to levy taxes for Charles I. to use in aid of Protestant Holland, that he should first order every Catholic priest in his own realm to be put to death and the property of all Catholics to be confiscated. Charles refused. This side of the cause of the rupture between Charles I. and his Parliament has not the historic prominence of the other side. Why? Not very hard to tell _why_ if one considers attentively the writers of the history of that period.