There is little enough left of Jan’s work, and for the same humiliating reason that holds in the case of his brother. Of Hans Memling, another wonder child, there is fortunately much. When one catalogues the list of this earliest and greatest work in Flanders and recalls the wrecking with axe and torch of cathedrals, abbeys, convents, hospitals, châteaux by Calvinists and sans-culottes; the pyres of smouldering pictures, the ditches filled up with pulverised glass, shattered statues, illuminated missals and graduales and books of hours; the sacred vessels and gorgeous vestments, such as Hubert and Jan, Hans and Gerard showed in their pictures, despoiled of their splendid jewels (transferred for a consideration to Hebrew brokers) and melted down or used for chair covers, as the case may be; and when in this lurid light one weighs the thick hides and the muddled brains and the shrivelled souls of the wreckers against even the mere artistic value of their spoils, one marvels still more at the wonders of scientific evolution and the promises of evolutionary philosophy. Memling is the third of the great trio of Flemings, and though there were innumerable others whose art was near perfection, these three stand for ever by themselves apart. There is more of human tenderness in his work and a certain spiritualisation informing everything that gives a different quality; the portraiture and differentiation of character are possibly beyond what any other ever attained, but his composition as it gains in complexity and facile ease loses something of that broad and powerful directness, that supreme quality of rhythm and serenity that marked the Van Eycks. The colour also is less invariably sonorous, less pure and splendid and luminous both in its single tones and its harmonies, while now and then the universal Flemish passion for sumptuous stuffs and gorgeous patterns and glittering accessories betrays him into a loss of unity and balance. Still, any criticism is impudent; his St. Ursula series, his St. John Baptist, his St. Bertin and Floreins and Moreel altar-pieces are amongst the greatest pictures that [Illustration: A MEMLING ALTAR-PIECE _From a photograph by Hanfstaengl_] have been painted, while his portraits are pure life expressed through the terms of pure beauty.