The genuine admiration of this artless assemblage, was as marked a triumph to the genius of Rubens, as the pecking of the birds at his basket of fruit was to the execution of Apelles. I never saw such a rebuke to the “cant of criticism,” and I could not but feel it to be a compensation for the judgment of Sir Joshua Reynolds, who, I do not know why, professes to have been _disappointed_ with its excellence. The picture was painted for the corporation of gun-smiths, in order to compose a quarrel as to the ownership of a stripe of ground, on which they alleged that Rubens had encroached, in the erection of his house and gardens. Another story concerning it, is that the pupils of Rubens, in their romps during his absence, had thrown down one of their number, who in his fall, had rubbed out the arm of the beautiful Magdalene, and that, in order to restore it before the return of their master, they selected Vandyke, who repaired it with so much ability, that Rubens acknowledged its superiority to the original. The painting, like all the other treasures of Belgium, was one of the ornaments of the Louvre, during the reign of Napoleon. _The tomb of Rubens_ is in a little chapel, consecrated especially to his family, in the Church of St. Jacques; it is situated immediately in the rear of the high altar and the choir. Its only ornament is an exquisite picture of a Holy Family, by “the illustrious dead,” in which he has introduced portraits of himself as Saint George, his two wives, Isabel Brandt and Helen Forman, as Martha and Mary, his father as St. Joseph, his grandfather as Time, and his child as a cherubim. In a vault beneath, is laid the dust which is Even in itself an immortality. It is covered by a single slab of marble, with an inscription which records the talents and the learning of the Seigneur of Steen (Stein i toparcha), of whom it says, “_non sui tantum seculi, sed et omnis ævi Apelles dici meunt_. His genius,” it proceeds to say, “elevated him to the friendship and the confidence of kings and princes; so that when named a counsellor of state, by Philip IV, King of Spain and the Indies, and despatched as his ambassador to the court of England, he laid the basis of peace between his Sovereign and King Charles II. His family are now extinct, and this monument to his memory, which had long, as the inscription says, been neglected by his last descendants, was restored in 1775, by one who was then a canon of the cathedral, and who traced a relationship with the great painter in the maternal line, “_ex matre et avia nepos_.””