remarked in this place that to see Rubens at his best, one must not go to the National Gallery or to the Louvre or to the Prado--Antwerp and Vienna hold some of the finest examples of his second and third manner. And we must never forget that Art is concerned with treatment, and that subject is of secondary interest to artists. When he became recognised as a diplomatist whose services were required by Europe's greatest potentates, Rubens had passed the meridian of life. He had known prosperity from the very earliest days, he had no occasion to paint pictures of the sort so admirably summed up by the offensive word "pot-boiler." Kings and Queens and Emperors were offering him commissions, he was, if we may say so, on his best behaviour. He rose to the height of every great occasion. The commission that Maria de Medici gave him for her palace seems to have brought him to his third and latest manner, and from that year until death overtook him Rubens was one of the great masters of European art. If we could eliminate all the pictures of his first manner and a considerable portion of those belonging to his middle period, his claims would hardly be denied by the representatives and supporters of any school. He seems to have received added inspiration from his child wife, and there are few more delightful pictures than one to be seen in Munich in which Rubens and Helena Fourment are walking from their garden to their château. Perhaps even in the later days woman was nothing more than a thing of beauty for a man's delight, and man was no more than a godlike animal, but a well-defined measure of refinement was always beyond their painter's mental or artistic conceptions. It is sufficient for us that the appeal of nature came to him with great strength. The Château of Stein in our National Gallery and the Rainbow Landscape in the Wallace Collection gives sufficient evidence of this, while such a work as the Garden of Venus in the Prado suggests the limitations that were with him throughout his life. It is fair to say that in the later years they were not expressed so prominently in his work. [Illustration: PLATE VIII.--THE VIRGIN AND THE HOLY INNOCENTS (In the Louvre) In this picture Rubens allows his brush to run away with him as though for sheer joy in its capacity. Perhaps his study of the Virgin is a little commonplace, a little too suggestive of the exuberance of Flanders rather than the refinement and spirituality of Nazareth. But the studies of the Holy Innocents are a delight, and make the canvas supremely attractive. It will be seen that the grouping of the children results in every possible difficulty that an artist may have to face, but that Rubens has encountered them all with sure, hard, and steady eye, in fashion worthy of Tintoretto himself.]