We have it on Dürer's own authority that he took up etching and wood-engraving because it paid better. And strange--into this bread-and-butter work he put his best. It is not his painting that made his fame and name, though in that branch of Art he was admired by a Raphael and a Bellini. Agnes Frey bore him no children; this fact, I think, is worthy of note. Even a cursory glance at Dürer's etchings and woodcuts will reveal the fact that he was fond of children--"kinderlieb," as the Germans say. I do not doubt that he would have given us even more joy and sunshine in his Art had he but called a child his own. Instead, we have too often the gloomy reflection of death throughout his work. The gambols and frolics of angelic cupids are too often obscured by the symbols of suffering, sin, and death. Again, we must not allow a logical conclusion to be accepted as an absolute truth. Dürer was certainly more familiar with death and suffering than we are. Unless the grey lady and the dark angel visit our own homes, most of us--of my readers, at any rate--have to seek deliberately the faces of sorrow in the slums and the grimaces of death in the Coroner's Court. But in Dürer's days death lurked beyond the city walls; the sight of the slain or swinging victims of knightly valour, and peasant's revenge, blanched the cheeks of many maidens, and queer plagues and pestilences mowed the most upright to the ground. The Dance of Death was a favourite subject with the old painters, not because their disposition was morbid, but because the times were more out of joint than they are now. All these points have to be realised before one can hope to understand Dürer even faintly. Again, when we examine more closely the apparently quaint and fantastic form his mode of visualising takes, we must make allowances for the habits and customs and costumes of the times--as indeed one has to, in the case of all old masters, and for which reason I humbly submit that the study of old masters properly belongs to the few, not the many. A great deal of erroneous opinions are held simply because it is difficult to disentangle the individual from the typical. Dürer, whose wanderjahre had taken him to Strasburg and Bâle and Venice, returned home again apparently uninfluenced. Critics from Raphael's age down to the last few years have lamented this fact; have thought that "knowledge of classic antiquity" might have made a better artist of him.