The early scribes piled fancy upon invention, believing or pretending that Rembrandt was a miser, a profligate, a spendthrift, and so on.

"Houbraken's facts," we read, "are interwoven with a mass of those suspicious anecdotes which adorn the plain tale of so many artistic biographies.

Campo-Weyermann, Dargenville, Descamps, and others added further embellishments, boldly piling fable upon fable for the amusement of their readers, till legend gradually ousted truth." All this and much more he would have had to unlearn, discovering in the end the simple truth that Rembrandt lived for his art; that he loved and was kind to his wife and to the servant girl who, when Saskia died, filled her place; that he was neither saint nor sinner; that he was extravagant because beautiful things cost money; that being an artist he did not manage his affairs with the wisdom of a man of the world; that he was hot-headed, and played a hot-headed man's part in the family quarrels; and that he was plucky and improvident, and probably untidy to the end, and that he did his best work when the buffets of fate were heaviest.
The new era in Rembrandt literature began with Kolloff's _Rembrandt's Leben und Werke_, published in 1854.

This contribution to truth was followed by the works of Messrs.

Buerger and Vosmaer, by the lucubrations of other meritorious bookworms, by the studies of Messrs.