manifested in his work, how deeply he appreciated their highly cultured mind and heart. This freedom of religion went hand in hand with an animated mental evolution and naturally favoured it considerably. At the time of Rembrandt’s settlement in Amsterdam we find proof of this in the foundation, in 1632, of a classical school, the forerunner of the later university, called the “Athenæum illustre,” where the celebrated professors Vossius and Van Baerle (or Barloeus) initiated many youths into the secrets of philosophy, languages, and other sciences. Within the leading classes of Amsterdam’s population, supported by the great merchants, interest in matters of art and science strongly develops, though as we noticed before, in the case of the town-hall architecture, with a marked preference for classicism and all foreign civilization. It seems as though these clever merchants could not understand that their own genial countrymen were sufficiently gifted and quite capable of astonishing the world by their work; this increasing lack of mutual appreciation is not so astonishing, if we take into consideration Holland’s, and especially Amsterdam’s, rapid growth, making all those people (aside from the great artists, who were sufficiently confident in their own powers), feel small and humble in face of the firmly established fame and merits of the classics and the Italians. The large and fertile School of Amsterdam painters, Rembrandt foremost among them, felt this keenly: landscapes of Italy and allegorical and mythological subjects were preferred to the productions of an art intensely national, the sincerity of which failed to impress the Dutch amateurs. Even portraiture, an art where sincerity is so indispensable, felt the effects of the people’s blindness, and in the last years of Rembrandt’s life we see those portrait-painters coming to the fore, who did away with true expression of character and joined the private burghers in their decadent predilection for artificiality in dress and appearance.