Whatever objection may be legitimately raised to the application of the title "The Good" to a ruler of Philip's character, this Burgundian had many of the qualities that go to the making of a successful monarch. His military talents were considerable; his political methods, though despotic, were practicable. Though he taxed the wealth of his country, he protected and encouraged the commerce and {7} manufactures of Holland and Flanders, their arts and crafts, science and literature. He founded at Bruges the famous Burgundian Library. He remodelled, and to some extent endowed, the University of Louvain. His munificence and princely generosity attracted to his Court at Bruges men of letters like Oliver de la Marche and Philippe de Commines, and famous painters like Jan van Eyck, and perhaps, though we lack documentary evidence, his elder brother Hubert, who gave, perhaps, more to the art of painting than even did Coster to the art of printing, or Philip himself to the sciences of statesmanship and war. The most salient points in the life and work of these two brothers, who close the period of stiff Gothic medievalism and stand on the threshold of modern art, and whose improvements in the technical methods of their art opened up to their successors unthought-of possibilities, are shrouded in deep mystery, and the most recent research to which a number of thoroughly competent scientific experts have devoted themselves, whilst producing many ingenious theories and deductions, has, in a certain sense, added to the confusion by throwing doubt upon the authenticity of documents {8} and inscriptions which had formerly passed undisputed, and formed the basis of the unstable edifice that had been erected around the vague fame of the brothers Van Eyck. This uncertainty begins with the parentage and the place and date of birth of the two masters, and extends to the two supreme achievements to which they owe their fame--the reputed invention of oil-painting, which was variously ascribed to Hubert and Jan, then denied to both of them, and, finally, given back to Hubert in the form of an improvement on the methods of oil-painting practised during the period; and the much-quoted inscription on the famous Ghent altar-piece, _The Adoration of the Lamb_, which has been, and must remain, the starting-point for all research in this matter, even though the late Henri Bouchot, Keeper of the Print Cabinet of the Bibliothèque Nationale, suggests that this inscription may have been added when the picture was restored in the middle of the sixteenth century. At every turn we are faced by similar doubts and contradictions, especially in the case of Hubert, about whose life and doings we have so little documentary evidence that we have to fall back entirely upon conjecture and deduction. [Illustration: THE ADORATION OF THE LAMB. BY HUBERT AND JAN VAN EYCK.] {9} HUBERT VAN EYCK