The picture represents a swan standing above its nest of eggs, in a fierce and threatening attitude, prepared to repel the attack of a dog. Above the latter is an inscription in Dutch, signifying “The Enemy of the State,” while one of the eggs is lettered “Holland,” and beneath the swan are the words “Grand Pensionary,” the title of the office of Johan de Witt. Since the artist, Jan Asselyn, died in 1652, it is possible that his picture originally had no allegorical intent, but that its owner, seeing its application to the political situation, caused the inscriptions to be added. However this may be, it remains a curious document of the internal dissensions that at this period rent the little republic, and ended with the murder of De Witt and his brother by an Orange mob in 1672. Of the entanglements into which the union of the house of Orange with the Stuarts eventually led the country, it is enough here to recall that the enmity of Spain had been replaced by that of France. The ambition of Louis XIV threatened not only Holland but Europe; and it was against this that William III during his Stadtholdership, and later, when he also occupied the throne of England, directed the military resources of both countries and his own unrivaled genius as a diplomatist. The result was a war, interrupted temporarily by nominal treaties of peace, but actually protracted beyond the lifetime of William, until the power of France had been beaten down by Marlborough, and peace was secured by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. Hobbema, the last of the great Dutch painters of the seventeenth century, had died six years before. Peace removed the barriers that Holland had erected for her self-preservation. Her artists, like her traders, wandered afield. The old centripetal tendency, which compelled the artist to find initiative in his own surroundings at home and so bred a distinctly Holland school, was superseded by the tendency to look for motive outside. The painter found it in Italy; he and his art became Italianate. This is not to say that the Holland painters of the eighteenth century are without merit. The best undoubtedly have a charm of their own; but it is not of the kind that one has learned to recognize and respect in the earlier pictures, as being a characteristic product of a nation fighting to maintain the integrity and independence of its nationality. The charm is by comparison slender and superficial, the product, not of originality, but of imitation. For the art of Holland had ceased to be the expression of conviction, and no longer exemplified the morality that had given character to its motive and unimpeachable integrity to its technique. CHAPTER IV FRANS HALS