Read Ebook: The Chautauquan Vol. 04 May 1884 No. 8 by Chautauqua Institution Chautauqua Literary And Scientific Circle Flood Theodore L Editor

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That the person is of proper age and sound mind;

That all statements and declarations be made in clear, unambiguous language, so that a misconception of it will be impossible;

That, in propriety, the word "bequeath" should be used as applied to personal estate, and "devise" as belonging to real;

That, unless a life estate simply is intended, words of inheritance should be coupled with devisee's name;

That, in most of the states, three witnesses are required. They should be wholly disinterested, so far as having no personal interest in the will; they should see the testator sign, and should each attach his signature in testator's presence, and in presence of the others;

That it is well for the testator to name an executor, although this is not required, since in the absence of such directions the Court will appoint an administrator.

OUTLINE OF FORM.

I ? ? of ? ? being of sound mind, hereby make and declare this to be my last will and testament. I give, devise and bequeath my estate and property, real and personal as follows:

In witness whereof I have signed, sealed, published and declared this instrument to be my last will and testament, at ? this ? day of ?.

? ?

The witnesses then add:

The said ? ? on said ? day of ? signed, published and declared the above as his last will and testament; and we, at his request, and in his presence, and in the presence of each other, have hereunto subscribed our names as witnesses thereto.

? ? ? ? ? ?

The destruction of a will revokes it. The making of a new will revokes all former ones.

SUNDAY READINGS.

Methinks I hear him still saying to me, "Poor sinner, though thou hast dealt unkindly with me, and cast me off, yet I will not do so by thee; though thou hast set light by me and all my mercies, yet they and myself are thine. What wouldst thou have that I can give thee? And what dost thou want that I can not give thee? If anything I have will give thee pleasure, thou shalt have it. Wouldst thou have pardon? I freely forgive thee all the debt. Wouldst thou have grace and peace? Thou shalt have both. Wouldst thou have myself? Behold I am thine, thy friend, thy Lord, thy brother, husband and head. Wouldst thou have the Father? I will bring thee to him, and thou shalt have him, in and by me." These were my Lord's reviving words.

For we, being accustomed to a careless and perfunctory performing of these duties, can not but find it a hard and difficult matter to keep our hearts so close unto them as to perform them as we ought to do, and so as that we may be really said to do them. For we must not think that sitting in the church while the word of God is preached, is hearing the word of God, or being present there while prayers are read is real praying; no, no, there is a deal more required than this to our praying to the great God aright; insomuch that, for my own part, I really think that prayer, as it is the highest, so it is the hardest duty that we can be engaged in; all the faculties of our souls as well as members of our bodies being obliged to put forth themselves in their several capacities, to the due performance of it.

Now, upon the bank of the river, on the other side, they saw the two Shining Men again, who there waited for them. Therefore, being come out of the river, they saluted them, saying: "We are ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for those who shall be heirs of salvation." Thus they went toward the gate.

Now, you must note that the city stood upon a mighty hill; but the pilgrims went up that hill with ease, because they had these two men to lead them up by the arms; they had likewise left their mortal garments behind them in the river; for though they went in with them, they came out without them. They therefore went up here with much agility and speed, though the foundation upon which the city was framed was higher than the clouds; they therefore went up through the regions of the air, sweetly talking as they went, being comforted because they safely got over the river, and had such glorious companions to attend them.

If we can make this with ourselves: I was in times past dead in trespasses and sins, I walked after the prince that ruleth in the air, and after the spirit that worketh in the children of disobedience; but God, who is rich in mercy, through his great love, wherewith he loved me, even when I was dead, hath quickened me in Christ. I was fierce, heady, proud, high minded, but God hath made me like a child that is newly weaned. I loved pleasures more than God; I followed greedily the joys of this present world; I esteemed him that erected a stage or theater more than Solomon which built a temple to the Lord; the harp, viol, timbrel, and pipe, men singers and women singers were at my feast; it was my felicity to see my children dance before me; I said of every kind of vanity, O how sweet art thou unto my soul! All which things are now crucified to me, and I to them; now I hate the pride of life, and the pomp of this world; now I take as great delight in the way of thy testimonies, O Lord, as in all riches; now I find more joy of heart in my Lord and Savior, than the worldly minded man when "his possessions do much abound;" now I taste nothing sweet but the bread which came down from heaven, to give life unto the world; now my eyes see nothing but Jesus rising from the dead; now my ears refuse all kinds of melody, to hear the song of them that have gotten the victory of the beast and of his image, and of his mark, and of the number of his name, that stand on the sea of glass, "having the harps of God, and singing the song of Moses the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb, saying, Great and marvelous are thy works, Lord God Almighty; just and true are thy ways, O King of saints." Surely, if the Spirit have been thus effectual in the sacred work of our regeneration with newness of life, if we endeavor thus to form ourselves anew, then we may say boldly with the blessed apostle, in the tenth to the Hebrews: We are not of them that withdraw ourselves to perdition, but which follow faith to the salvation of the soul....

READINGS IN ART.

This paper is abridged from "German, Flemish and Dutch Paintings," by H. J. Wilmot Buxton, M.A., and Edward J. Poynter, R.A.

Art in Germany and the Netherlands may be considered as beginning about the middle of the fourteenth century. There is, however, no name of importance in the German school of artists until the time of Albrecht D?rer. Before him painters had shown little or no originality in their work. They had followed the Byzantine models largely, and had been influenced by the servile and narrow influences of the middle ages. With the new intellectual and spiritual life which sprang up in the fifteenth century, artistic life awoke in Germany. D?rer was the first and greatest master of the school. He was born in Nuremberg on the 21st of May, 1471.

His father was a Hungarian, who settled in Nuremberg as a goldsmith. Albrecht D?rer was taught his father's trade, but fortunately his talent for art was observed, and he was sent, in 1484, a boy of thirteen years, to Schongauer. In 1486 he was apprenticed to Michael Wolgemut for three years. From the studio of his master, Albrecht D?rer passed, in the year 1490, to a new world--he traveled; and in those "wander-years," which lasted till 1494, he was doubtless laying in stores of learning for the after-time; but unfortunately we know nothing of those years, except that he had a glimpse of Venice, the first sight of the Italian paradise which, in his case, though seen again, never made him unfaithful to the art of his fatherland. In 1494, Albrecht D?rer returned to Nuremberg, and married Agnes Frey, the daughter of a singer. He received two hundred florins with his wife for her dowry, and it has been said that with her he found more than two thousand unhappy days. In 1506, D?rer again traveled to Italy, and found a warm welcome from the painters at Venice, a city which he now beheld for the second time. Doubtless he learned much from the works which he saw, and the criticism which he heard, but, fortunately for his country, he could go to Italy without becoming a copyist. Giovanni Bellini paid him especial honor, and D?rer tells us that he considered Bellini "the best painter of them all."

Once more at home in his beloved Nuremberg, D?rer wrote to remind the Town Council that whilst the people of Venice and Antwerp had offered him liberal sums to dwell among them, his own city had not given him five hundred florins for thirty years of work. But we must pass to the end. Whether the health of Albrecht D?rer had been injured by home cares and the tongue of Agnes Frey, we know not, though many passages in his letters and journal seem to point to this fact. He died on the 6th of April, 1528, and was buried in the cemetery of St. John, at Nuremberg.

Most of D?rer's works are to be found in Germany. In the Louvre there are only three or four drawings. The Museum of Madrid possesses several of his paintings--a "Crucifixion" , showing the maturity of his genius, two "Allegories" of the same type as the "Dance of Death," so favorite a subject at this period, and a "Portrait of Himself," bearing the date 1496. At Munich we may trace, in a series of seventeen pictures, the dawn, the noonday, and the evening of Albrecht D?rer's art. The "Portrait of his Father," 1497, is one of his earliest works. His father was then seventy years old. The color is warm and harmonious. The masterpiece of D?rer's art is the painting of the four apostles--"St. John, St. Peter, St. Paul and St. Mark." This wonderful work is clearly the production of his later years; it bears no date, but the absence of the hardness, which Michael Wolgemut's workshop had imparted to his early style, is gone, and the whole work shows the influence of his travels and unflagging study. It is usually assigned to the year 1526. The picture has been supposed to represent the "Four Temperaments," but there is no satisfactory proof that D?rer intended this.

The "Adoration of the Trinity" is one of the most famous of D?rer's works. It is a vast allegorical picture, representing the Christian Religion.

Of his wood-cuts the best known are the "Apocalypse," 1498; the "Life of the Virgin," 1511; and the "History of Christ's Passion." Of his copper-plate engravings, "St. Hubert," "St. Jerome," and "The Knight, Death, and the Devil," bearing the date 1513, in which we see what Kugler calls "the most important work which the fantastic spirit of German art has ever produced." The weird, the terrible, and the grotesque look forth from this picture like the forms of some horrible nightmare. Another famous engraving, called "Melancholy," is full of mystic poetry; it bears the date 1514. To these may be added a series of sixteen drawings in pen and ink on gray paper, heightened with white, representing "Christ's Passion," which he never engraved. They are in his best style, and among the finest of his works.

HANS HOLBEIN.

Holbein was employed to celebrate the marriage of Anne Boleyn by painting two pictures in tempera in the Banqueting Hall of the Easterlings, at the Steelyard. He chose the favorite subjects for such works, "The Triumph of Riches," and "The Triumph of Poverty." The pictures probably perished in the Great Fire of London. In 1538, Holbein was engaged on a very delicate mission, considering the matrimonial peculiarities of his royal master. He was sent to Brussels to paint the "Portrait of Christina," widow of Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, whom Henry would have made his queen, had she been willing. Soon after, having refused an earnest invitation from B?le to return there, Holbein painted an aspirant to the royal hand, Anne of Cleves. Perhaps the painter flattered the lady; at all events the original was so distasteful to the king that he burst into a fit of rage which cost Thomas Cromwell his head. Holbein continued his work as a portrait painter, and has left us many memorials of the Tudor Court. He died in 1543, of the plague, but nothing is known of his burial place. Some time before his death we hear of him as a resident in the parish of St. Andrew Undershaft, in the city.

The fame of this great master rests almost entirely upon his power as a portrait painter. In the collection of drawings at Windsor, mostly executed in red chalk and Indian ink, we are introduced to the chief personages who lived in and around the splendid court in the troublous times of the second Tudor.

JOHANN FRIEDRICH OVERBECK.

After the death of D?rer and Holbein the German school did not long hold its supremacy. Its decline was rapid, and not until the present century was there a re-awakening. Johann Friedrich Overbeck, the chief of the revivalists of German art, was born at L?beck, in 1789. When about eighteen years of age he went to Vienna, to study painting in the academy of that city. The ideas on art which he had carried with him were so entirely new and so little agreeable to the professors of the academy, that they met with but small approval. On the other hand, there were several among his fellow-pupils who gladly followed his lead; and in 1810, Overbeck, accompanied by a small band of youthful artists, went to Rome, where he established the school which was afterward to become so famous.

Overbeck, who was professor of painting in the Academy of St. Luke, a foreign member of the French Institute, and a member of all the German academies, died at Rome in 1869, at the advanced age of eighty years. He painted both in fresco and in oil. Of his productions in fresco, the most noteworthy are a "Vision of St. Francis" in Santa Maria degli Angeli, at Assisi, and five scenes from Tasso's "Jerusalem Delivered," in the villa of the Marchese Massimo, in Rome. Of his oil paintings, the best are the "Triumph of Religion in the Arts," in the St?del Institute at Frankfort; "Christ on the Mount of Olives," at Hamburg; the "Entrance of Christ into Jerusalem," painted in 1816 for the Marien Kirche, at L?beck; and a "Descent from the Cross," at L?beck. Overbeck also executed a number of small drawings. Of these we may mention forty designs of the "Life of Christ," and many other Biblical subjects.

THE SCHOOL OF THE NETHERLANDS.

On his return to Antwerp in 1630, he married his second wife, Helena Fourment, a girl of sixteen, belonging to one of the richest families in the city. She served him many times as a model for his pictures. The great master died in 1640, wealthy, honored, and famous, not only in his own city, but in many another. He was buried in the Church of St. Jacques at Antwerp.

In speaking briefly of the chief works of Rubens, we come first to the "Descent from the Cross," in Antwerp Cathedral. We find in this wonderful work perfect unity, and a nobler conception and more finished execution than usual. Of the coloring it is needless to speak. But even here in this masterpiece we notice the absence of spirituality. The dead Christ is an unidealized study, magnificently painted and drawn, but unredeemed by any divinity of form, or pathos of expression in the head, so that we discover no foregleam of the Resurrection; it is a dead body, no more. Among the eighteen pictures by Rubens in the Antwerp Museum, is a "Last Communion of St. Francis," which has a great reputation, but suffers from the ignoble type of St. Francis's head. It was painted in 1619.

ANTOON VAN DYCK,

REMBRANDT.

Contemporaneous with the Flemish school of which Rubens and Van Dyck were the masters, was the Dutch school, of which the great name was Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn. Few persons have suffered more from their biographers than the painters of the Dutch school, and none of them more than Rembrandt. The writings of Van Mander, and the too active imagination of Houbraken, have misrepresented these artists in every possible way. Thus Rembrandt has been described as the son of a miller, one whose first ideas of light and shadow were gained among his father's flour sacks in the old mill at the Rhine. He has been described as a spendthrift reveler at taverns, and as marrying a peasant girl. All this is fiction. The facts are briefly these: Rembrandt was born on July 15, 1607, in the house of his father, Hermann Gerritszoon Van Rijn, a substantial burgess, the owner of several houses, and possessing a large share in a mill on the Weddesteeg at Leyden. Educated at the Latin school at Leyden, and intended for the study of the law, Rembrandt's early skill as an artist determined his father to allow him to follow his own taste.

But it was not from these nor from any master that Rembrandt learnt to paint. Nature was his model, and he was his own teacher. In 1630 he produced one of his earliest oil paintings, the "Portrait of an Old Man," and at this time he settled as a painter in Amsterdam. He devoted himself to the teaching of his pupils more than to the cultivation of the wealthy, but instead of being the associate of drunken boors, as some have described him, he was the friend of the Burgomaster Six, of Jeremias de Decker the poet, and many other persons of good position. In 1632 Rembrandt produced his famous picture, "The Lesson in Anatomy;" about that time he was established in Sint Antonie Breedstraat; in the next year he married Saskia van Ulenburch, the daughter of the Burgomaster of Leeuwarden, whose face he loved to paint best after that of his old mother. We may see Saskia's portrait in the famous picture, "Rembrandt with his wife on his knee," in the Dresden Gallery; and a "Portrait of Saskia" alone is in the Cassel Gallery.

In the year 1640 Rembrandt painted a portrait, long known under the misnomer of "The Frame-maker." It is usually called "Le Doreur," and it is said that the artist painted the portrait in payment for some picture frames; but is in reality a portrait of Dorer, a friend of Rembrandt. The year 1642 saw Rembrandt's masterpiece, the so-called "Night-watch." Saskia died in the same year, and the four children of the marriage all died early, Titus, the younger son, who promised to follow in his father's steps, not surviving him. Rembrandt was twice married after Saskia's death. The latter years of the great master's life were clouded by misfortune. Probably owing to the stagnation of trade in Amsterdam, Rembrandt grew poorer and poorer, and in 1656 was insolvent. His goods and many pictures were sold by auction in 1658, and realized less than 5,000 guilders. Still he worked bravely on. His last known pictures are dated 1668. On the 8th of October, 1669, Rembrandt died, and was buried in the Wester Kerk.

Rembrandt was the typical painter of the Dutch School; his treatment is distinctly Protestant and naturalistic. Yet he was an idealist in his way, and as "The King of Shadows," as he has been called, he brought forth from the dark recesses of nature, effects which become, under his pencil, poems upon canvas. Rembrandt loved to paint pictures warmed by a clear, though limited light, which dawns through masses of shadow, and this gives much of that air of mystery so noticeable in his works. In most of his pictures painted before 1633, there is more daylight and less shadow, and the work is more studied and delicate.

In the National Gallery we find two portraits of Rembrandt, one representing him at the age of thirty-two, another when an old man. In the same collection is the "Woman taken in Adultery" , and the "Adoration of the Shepherds" , both superb in arrangement and execution. Germany and Russia are almost as rich as Holland in the number of Rembrandt's pictures which they possess. The "Descent from the Cross," in the Munich Gallery, is a specimen of the sacred subjects of this master. He interprets the Bible from the Protestant and realistic standpoint, and though the coloring of the pictures is marvelous, the grotesque features and Walloon dress of the personages represented make it hard to recognize the actors in the gospel story. Many of his Scripture characters were doubtless painted from the models afforded him in the Jews' quarter of Amsterdam, where he resided. The magnificent panoramic landscape belonging to Lord Overstone, and the famous picture of "The Mill" against a sunset sky, are signal examples of his poetic power, and his etchings show us this peculiarity of his genius, even more than his oil paintings. Of these etchings, which range over every class of subject, religious, historical, landscape and portrait, there is a fine collection in the British Museum; and they should be studied in order to understand the immense range of his superb genius. The "Ecce Homo," to say nothing of the splendor, the light and shade, and richness of execution, has never been surpassed for dramatic expression; and we forgive the commonness of form and type in the expression of touching pathos in the figure of the Savior; nor would it be possible to express with greater intensity the terrible raging of the crowd, the ignobly servile and cruel supplications of the priests, or the anxious desire to please on the part of Pilate. The celebrated plate "Christ Healing the Sick," exhibits in the highest perfection his mastery of chiaroscuro, and the marvelous delicacies of gradation which he introduced into his more finished work.

The number of Rembrandt's pictures in Holland, although it includes his three greatest, is remarkably small--indeed, they may be counted on the fingers; and lately, by the sale of the Van Loon collection, the Dutch have lost two more of his finest works in the portraits of the "Burgomaster Six" and "His Wife." But his works abound in the other great galleries of Europe.

SELECTIONS FROM AMERICAN LITERATURE.

THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH.

It is the vision of a gentle, tender spirit, and many eyes unused to tears will grow moist over the delicate lines. We have not room for the whole.

"Baby Bell."

Have you not heard the poets tell, How came the dainty Baby Bell Into this world of ours? The gates of heaven were left ajar; With folded hands and dreamy eyes, Wandering out of Paradise, She saw this planet, like a star, Hung in the glistening depths of even-- Its bridges, running to and fro, O'er which the white-winged angels go, Bearing the holy dead to heaven. She touched a bridge of flowers--those feet, So light they did not bend the bells Of the celestial asphodels. They fell like dew upon the flowers; Then all the air grew strangely sweet! And thus came dainty Baby Bell Into this world of ours.

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