Poor Hollar with his two thousand seven hundred and thirty-three prints faithfully and pedantically enumerated by collectors! Fate laid a very heavy hand on him. Some of the prints are now extremely rare, and command high prices. "They are generally etched, and are executed with surprising lightness and spirit. His point is free, playful, and at the same time firm and finished." Such is the criticism of posterity. In Antwerp he worked for a small pittance for the booksellers. Returning to England in 1652 he met with little encouragement, and while he executed his plates in "playful" delicacy the wolf was at the door, and hunger and want were his bed companions. "Surprising lightness and spirit"—what a debt posterity owes to such a man! The squabbles in the auction-room over his "rare states" are part payment, but nobody lays a wreath to his memory on his grave in St. Margaret's Churchyard.
The Great Plague in 1665, with its hundred thousand victims in London and the Great Fire in the following year, laid his fortunes lower still. It is true he went with Lord Howard to Tangier in the capacity of His Majesty's draughtsman, but on his return his honorarium and expenses of a hundred pounds were with difficulty paid. Those were the days of the Merry Monarch, when the seamen's wives came clamouring to the Admiralty demanding the long-deferred payment of their husbands' wages while the guns of De Ruyter could be heard distinctly from the Tower booming down the Thames.
In 1677 Hollar died in wretched poverty in London. As he lay dying the bailiffs entered the
