These few circumstances represent practically all that is known of Frans Hals’s life as a man. The main suggestion to be derived from them is that he was held in considerable esteem by his fellow-townsmen. The painters enrolled him in their guild; his creditor did not unduly press him, and the municipality attended to the needs of his declining years. It is fit to dwell on these points, because a tradition, apparently started by Houbraken, the painter-historian of the artists of the period, has clung about the memory of Hals, representing him to have been a frequenter of pot-houses and generally dissolute. But, except for the reprimand administered to him in the affair of his first wife, there is nothing on record to prove the accuracy of this tradition. One is therefore permitted to believe that the incident was a single offense; sufficiently reprehensible, but not to be counted against his whole life. On the other hand, the leniency of the baker and the relief voted by the municipality may be fairly taken as arguments against the story of his worthlessness. But the most reliable evidence of its falsity is to be found in his work as an artist. It is inconceivable that the portraits and character studies which he executed in such numbers could have been produced by a man whose brain was fuddled with dissipation. The very character of his technique gives the lie to such a suspicion; for, as we shall see presently, it was the product of a particularly vigorous comprehension of facts, and was rendered in a method extraordinarily direct and sure, and often under circumstances of great rapidity. While his work is uneven in quality, it is only toward the end that there is a falling off in the certainty and the completeness of his technique. But the pathos that attaches to the two memorable examples of this decline, which now hang in the Haarlem Museum, the groups of male and female _Regents of the Hospital for the Poor_, is due to their revelation, not of any premature loss of power, but of the sapping of vitality which comes after fourscore years.