For this reason and that, every industrious and thoughtful, as well as every careless, student of pictorial Art, has his own favourites in Portraiture: there is our pride in Reynolds, our joy in Gainsborough, our wonder at the magic of Velasquez, our steady confidence in truth when Holbein is the draughtsman, our grave and brooding satisfaction over the august portraiture of the Venetians. But Rembrandt unites men’s suffrages--carries with him even those who admire most warmly this painter’s unswerving veracity and that one’s fluent grace. And as one thinks what was the human material which furnished elements for the creations of Rembrandt--the old men and the women and the youths of Amsterdam--one thinks all the more, how exalted was the vision, and yet how firmly with his feet on earth stood the man to whom it was vouchsafed! Over and over again, the needle, as the brush, of Rembrandt, has been occupied with a face which had no beauty--at all events no formal beauty--that we should desire him. He has given it interest and dignity--dignity without a touch of the artificial or pretentious; the dignity of the individual soul in its best hours. He did this more or less at all times, but he did it more markedly in his later time than in his earlier; for, wonderful as was the completeness of Rembrandt’s art within its self-set limits in even his earliest time, he had, in common with most of the greatest of creative and critical intellects, that gift of long development, of steady progression. Rembrandt was no juvenile prodigy. As time passed, as experience gathered, as misfortunes saddened--at all events in certain lonely hours--the spirit of a man of whom upon the whole indeed it may be said, he ‘rose distinct Above slave-sorrows, to his chariot linked,’ Rembrandt’s command of the instruments of his employment became only more complete, if also his method was more summary. More and more sonorous were the notes he uttered, and the _vox humana_ stop, which is absent in colder craftsmen, sounded with increased frequency and more assured appeal.