A poor, weak-spirited credulous creature was this obscure miniature painter, but for all that he seems to have had the soul of an artist and no little skill in his calling. Sometimes, indeed, he worked for princes, but he by no means despised the custom of their menials, was not above mere penmanship, and did not think it beneath him to alter or complete, even for a humble client, the unfinished work of a _confrère_. He journeyed half over Europe to dispose of his productions, to obtain new orders, to have his works bound in the most artistic fashion, to seek inspiration from the best models and to perfect himself generally in his art; and he used to collect wherever he went and from whomsoever he came in contact--from churches, from monasteries, from the private libraries of the nobles whose houses he frequented, from the menials whose acquaintance he made in the servants' hall, from courtiers, from begging friars, from the chance companions whom he drank with at inns, sometimes, perhaps, new receipts for mixing his colours and for laying on and burnishing gold, more often strange forms of devotion and talismans warranted to cure every imaginable ill, from love-philtres and charms to soothe toothache and settle disputes, to astrological formulæ to drive away the devil, and, above all, to enable him to keep in order 'those five great hulking apprentices' at home who always would idle away their time, and whenever he ventured to say a word to them ill-used him. Amongst the illuminators enrolled in the Guild of St. Luke were all sorts and conditions of men; from polished courtiers like John van Eyck to men doubtless of as questionable character as the obscure individual, half artist, half perhaps fortune teller, though, for the matter of that, he swore on the damnation of his soul he had had no dealings with familiar spirits, whose vagabond life the rack of Tristam has revealed to us. But whatever their social rank may have been, like the monks who worked alongside of them, the cloister was the rock from which they were hewn, and 'the exquisite work which some of them produced is sufficient to alone explain the origin of Flemish panel painting.' Thus, Monsieur Fiérens-Gevaert recently,[44] and Lübke and Wauters and Jules Helbig, before him, though these experts tell us that sculpture and wall painting had likewise some measure of influence, and traces of frescoes almost as old as the buildings they once adorned have of late years been found all over Flanders.