The lives of most of these artists have, till recently, rested on a somewhat shifting foundation. Dates of birth and death have fluctuated in various authors with easy rapidity. Of some, even now, nothing certain is known. But the researches of Dr. van der Willigen, Dr. Bredius, Dr. Hofstede de Groot, and others in the archives of the Dutch cities have proved much, disproved more, and set the whole subject in a clearer light. To Dr. Bredius’ _Meisterwerke der königlichen Gemälde-Galerie im Haag_, and [Illustration: _Fig. 1.--The Spectacle Seller. By Ostade. B. 29._] still more to his _Meisterwerke des Rijks Museum zu Amsterdam_, the writer is under special obligation, which he desires most gratefully to acknowledge. But in spite of many readjustments of chronology, materials for the lives of these artists are singularly meagre. Doubtless their lives were in most cases extremely simple. Many never left their native town, or exchanged it only for a home a few miles off: Haarlem for Amsterdam, or Amsterdam for the Hague. Others made the journey to Italy, or spent some years in France or Germany; but here the journey itself is sometimes only a matter of inference from the painter’s works. Birth, marriage, and death: there is little beyond these, and the dates of their principal productions, to record about many of these men. Of the whole social life of the Holland of that day we know practically nothing but what its paintings tell us. Had those paintings not survived, what a blank would be left in our conceptions of this country and its history! Most countries that have left us great art have left us also great literature, and each is the complement of the other. The marbles of the Parthenon have not only the enchantment of their incomparable sculpture, but bring to our minds a thousand recollections, gathered in the fields of literature. In a less degree, it is the same with our enjoyment of Italian painting. It is one aspect of the flowering time of the Renaissance, but not the only aspect, nor the only material we have for investigating and realising that movement. There was, no doubt, a certain amount of literature produced in seventeenth-century Holland; but it does not penetrate beyond Holland. Besides the names of Spinoza and of Grotius, who are great but not in literature proper, not a single author’s name is familiar, nor any book eminent enough to become a classic in translations. And it is certainly not for the sake of the literature that a foreigner learns Dutch. Hence a certain remoteness in our ideas about Holland, although it lies so near us: a remoteness emphasised in England by the general ignorance of the language.