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The remark was bruited throughout the city and did Rembrandt no good. His rivals combined to shut his work out of all exhibitions, and several made it their business to buy up the overdue claims against him.

Then officers came and took possession of his house, and his splendid collections of jewels, laces, furniture, curios and pictures were sold at auction. The fine dresses that once belonged to Saskia were seized: they even took her wedding-gown: and wanton women bid against the nobility for the possession of these things. Rembrandt was stripped of his sketches, and these were sold in bundles–the very sweat of his brain for years. Then he was turned into the streets.

But Hendrickje Stoffels still clung to him, his only friend. Rembrandt’s proud heart was broken. He found companionship at the taverns; and to get a needful loaf of bread for Hendrickje and his boy, made sketches and hawked them from house to house.

Fashions change and art is often only a whim. People wondered why they had ever bought those dark, shadowy things made by that Leyden artist, What’s-his-name! One man utilized the frames which contained “Rembrandts” by putting other canvases right over in front of them.

Rembrandt’s son Titus tried his skill at art, but with indifferent success. He died while yet a youth. Then Hendrickje passed away, and Rembrandt was alone–a battered derelict on the sea of life. He lost his identity under an assumed name, and sketched with chalk on tavern-walls and pavement for the amusement of the crowd.

He died in Sixteen Hundred Sixty-nine, and the expense of his burial was paid by the hands of charity.

The cost of the funeral was seven dollars and fifty cents.

In Eighteen Hundred Ninety-seven, there was sold in London a small portrait by Rembrandt for a sum equal to a trifle more than thirty-one thousand dollars. But even this does not represent the true value of one of his pictures–for connoisseurs regard a painting by Rembrandt as priceless.

There is a law in Holland forbidding any one on serious penalty to remove a “Rembrandt” from the country. If any one of the men who combined to work his ruin is mentioned in history, it is only to say, “He lived in the age of Rembrandt.”