Between that early etching, the first of his mother’s portraits, and this final one, his last record of the body, to which he has imparted a slimmer charm than the charm that belonged unquestionably to Hendrickje Stoffels, the young and sympathetic companion of his later years--recorded, opulent and somewhat sensuous, in the great Edinburgh picture,--the range of Rembrandt, in about three hundred prints, is almost inconceivably great. Several of his plates, and these not really the least attractive, are, like the rare sheet of studies, with the portrait of Rembrandt himself (No. 82 in the catalogue of Mr. Middleton-Wake), so to put it, thumb-nail sketches as he passed upon his way and was struck and interested by this or that countenance, this or that gesture. Many deal with Sacred Subjects, and invariably with a directness, a homeliness, one might say almost, that is his alone. It would have been impossible so to have conceived the incidents of Bible Story if Rembrandt had not so profoundly believed in them. The conventional and perfunctory are altogether banished. And though, for reasons that the present place would not perhaps be quite the fittest for dwelling on, the Sacred Subjects of this great Dutch master do not attract or charm as the portraits and the landscapes do, there is yet in them a world of material for serious study: in them invention and imagination enrich a treatment fortified already by closeness of observation. His mind is stored; his spirit is devout. In the ‘Death of the Virgin’ he takes advantage of tradition--gives us therefore not only St. Joseph moved at his loss, St. Luke with hand on wrist as feeling the pulse of the dying, but (as Mr. Middleton-Wake reminds us) a company of Apostles, brought miraculously, legend says, from distant missions; and, above, are angels and cherubim. A religious composition better known to the public, is the ‘Christ healing the Sick,’ or, as it is called often, ‘The Hundred-Guilder Print.’ It got that latter name because, during that portion of his life in which Rembrandt was popular, the then substantial sum of a hundred guilders was wont to be obtained for it, when, out of Rembrandt’s studio, an impression of it was sold. Its intense reality and homely pathos--the qualities in it which have influenced, so greatly, later and now living etchers, like Legros and William Strang--gave it immediate value. And since those days a fine impression has always had its price, though it should be said here that the difference in money value, established more particularly in our own generation, between a fine impression of the most rare ‘First State’ of this plate and the less rare but often as desirable ‘Second,’ is a fantastic difference, dependent only upon relative difficulty of acquisition. Thank goodness, even now a twenty-pound note will buy sometimes a most desirable Rembrandt etching. A couple of hundred guineas is required to buy a fine