of the ray of light which illumines the "Hundred Guilder Piece," the "Annunciation," or the "Pilgrimage to Emmaus." [Illustration: FIG. 65.--REMBRANDT. Tobit's Blindness.] [Illustration: FIG. 66.--REMBRANDT. Jan Lutma.] Rembrandt's method is, so to speak, supersensuous. At times he lightly touches his plate, and at times he attacks as at a venture; at others he skims the surface and caresses it with an exquisite refinement, a magical dexterity. In his lights he breaks the line of the contour, but only to resume and boldly accentuate it in his shadows; or he reverses the method, and in the one, as in the other case, succeeds infallibly in fixing, satisfying, and convincing the attention. He uses engraver's tools and methods as Bossuet uses words, subduing them to the needs of his thought, and constraining them to express it, careless of fine finish as of trivial subtlety. Like Bossuet, too, he composes out of the most incongruous elements, out of the trivial and the lofty, the commonplace and the heroic, a style invariably eloquent; and from the mingling of these heterogeneous elements there springs an admirable harmony of result. [Illustration: FIG. 67.--REMBRANDT. The Beggars.] The Flemish engravers formed by Rubens, and their Dutch contemporaries, had no worthy successors. The revolution they accomplished in the art was brief, and did not extend beyond the Low Countries. In Italy, Dutch and Flemish engravings were naturally despised. It is said--and it is easy to believe--that those accustomed to commune with Raphael and Marc Antonio esteemed them fitting decorations "for the walls of pothouses." In France and Germany, where Italian ideas in art had reigned since the sixteenth century, they experienced at first no better reception. When at length the consideration they really deserved was accorded them, the superiority of France was established, and her engravers could no longer be expected to descend to imitation. The movement in the schools of the Low Countries, before the second half of the seventeenth century, is thus, to speak truth, a mere episode in the history of the art, and its masterpieces had no lasting influence on engraving in general. For it to have been otherwise, the engravers of other countries must have renounced, not only the national traditions, but even the models they had at hand. The method of Bolswert or of Pontius could only be usefully employed to reproduce the works of Rubens and Van Dyck. The handling of Visscher and of Suyderhoef was only suitable to such pictures as were painted in Amsterdam and Leyden. [Illustration: FIG. 68.--REMBRANDT. The Pancake-maker.] And meanwhile, when the schools of the Low Countries were shining with a lustre so brilliant and so transitory, what was doing in France? and how in France was the great age of engraving inaugurated? CHAPTER VI.